Woodland works on updating greenhouse gas emissions inventory - Woodland Daily Democrat

Woodland works on updating greenhouse gas emissions inventory - Daily Democrat

Woodland is working on updating its greenhouse gas emissions inventory to better understand how well the city is doing at addressing climate change.

According to an Indiana University fact sheet, greenhouse gas inventories are the first step to managing emissions because they give local governments information on a community’s gas sources.

“The data can be used by community leaders to identify opportunities for governmental action and partnerships to achieve emissions reduction targets,” the fact sheet stated. “The information can also be used to understand where there are opportunities for energy efficiency, saving taxpayer money and more.”

During the Woodland City Council’s Tuesday evening meeting, Communications Manager Spencer Bowen delivered a short presentation regarding the city’s greenhouse gas inventory.

“Way back in July 2019, the county board of supervisors signed a contract with a consulting group called Ascent Environmental to prepare greenhouse gas inventories for the county and local jurisdictions like Woodland,” Bowen explained. “As part of that contract, they were also tasked with developing a tool that the jurisdictions could use again and again to update that inventory as situations change.”

He added that Woodland received its emissions inventory in April 2020, relying on data from 2016 due to what he called “a slight lag.”

Bowen is the staff representative for the city’s Sustainability Advisory Committee and said he is also a point of contact for any graduate student support the city receives on its key initiatives.

“January through May of this year we brought on graduate students from UC Berkeley to reexamine our climate action plan and make some recommendations about next steps,” he stated. “Among the many recommendations were some notes about updating our greenhouse gas inventory.”

The council then directed the sustainability advisory committee to dig through the graduate student’s report to “better be able to prioritize what items to focus on,” according to Bowen.

“They did just that, and at their August 2023 meeting, the Sustainability Advisory Committee recommended that the city move forward with exploring ways in which to update this greenhouse gas inventory,” he remarked.

Ideally, the tool created by Ascent to allow jurisdictions to update greenhouse gas emissions inventories arrived in September — three years after the contract was signed.

“It gives us a tool we can update with new data however often is reasonable and it allows the city and the member jurisdictions who benefit from it to calculate this in the same way, giving us some consistency that is sorely lacking right now.”

Tom Stallard asked if this means that the city will again be able to track this data annually so that it could see if they have been making progress with regard to greenhouse gas emissions.

“That’s the idea of having this,” Bowen replied. “We’ll have an evergreen tool… that will give us a lot more flexibility to produce up-to-date data.”

Stallard also asked how much the technology would cost and where the money was coming from to pay for it.

“The initial RFP (request for proposal ) that the supervisors signed with the consulting firm in 2019 was paid for by the county,” Bowen answered. “This comes at no general fund impact to the city. We’re a beneficiary.”

City Manager Ken Hiatt added that a benefit of using this county-wide tool is it will provide data from Yolo County jurisdictions that can now be compared.

“So we can track how we’re performing relative to our community partners,” he stated.

However, he argued that while getting the results and understanding them is one thing, what the city does with that information and how it informs the community “will probably be the harder work.”

Mark Alman, a member of the Sustainability Advisory Committee, delivered a public comment during the council’s meeting applauding the collaboration between the county’s local governments.

“I’m aware of what the county is doing and I’ve been calling for better collaboration between the local governments all along,” he emphasized. “I think this is a very good example of it.”

Alman said he also serves on the Community Advisory Committee of the Valley Clean Energy Alliance and highlighted some of the work the alliance has done in providing people with information on how to be more environmentally conscious.

“Another initiative for me is to make sure we’re not necessarily talking about these big-picture items to the exclusion of what people can do,” he added. “People can insulate and improve many things around the house and VCE has got some information that they now have on their website. I’d like to see something like that on the city’s website.”

Woodland’s website states that the city reports annual municipal greenhouse gas emissions to The Climate Registry, a non-profit organization that assists organizations in measuring, reporting and verifying emissions.

“In 2009, the city of Woodland was named a Climate Action Leader by the California Climate Action Registry after calculating, reporting and receiving third-party verification of our 2007 greenhouse gas emissions,” the website explained.

The Woodland City Council directed city staff to update the city’s greenhouse gas emissions inventory to better understand the city’s greenhouse gas emissions inventory.

For more information, visit cityofwoodland.org/467/Greenhouse-Gas-Inventory.