GHG Assessment at Local Level

Assessing greenhouse gas emissions is not just a climate protection issue, it is very important for efficient municipal energy management as well. Klímapolitika Kft. commissioned Energiaklub to develop a calculator worksheet and methodology for preparing greenhouse gas inventories on municipal and county levels.

The goal of this project was enabling local governments to estimate their annual greenhouse gas emissions using the calculator and the guidelines, and facilitating emission reduction and the rationalization of energy consumption. No specific skills are required for the preparation of the inventories. After collecting the input data, the embedded formulas calculate emissions.

Inventory-making worksheets were created for the following area levels:

  • county,
  • city,
  • capital,
  • capital district,
  • municipality and
  • set of municipalities.

For the selection of sectors to be included in the inventory we used the Hungarian National Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report (2016) and took into account the accessibility of necessary data sources. We chose the sectors with the highest emissions and those that have available regional data for calculating emissions. The selected sectors are:

  • energy consumption: energy industry: power and heat production, gas consumption in the following sectors: local government, industry, transportation, residential, service, agriculture, institutions;
  • industry processes: consumption of other energy sources and industrial processes of large emitters ; agriculture: ruminants, liquid manure management, use of organic and chemical fertilizers;
  • waste disposal and wastewater treatment.

Another important element of the project is that the calculator includes sinks (forests and green areas) as well.

Although municipalities already had access to the Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan (SECAP) methodology to help them with their greenhouse gas emission inventories, the new calculators can be used for other area levels as well, they support strategic decisions primarily and do not cover planning for specific actions. Another advantage of these calculators is that they help the local governments by providing exact data resources, which also enables to compare the emission estimates.