The City of Fishers joined the Environmental Resilience Institute’s Resilience Cohort in 2019 to conduct government operations and community-wide inventories for the 2015 and 2018 calendar years. The City gathered various data and used ICLEI’s ClearPath software to calculate emissions. City staff then presented the results to City officials.
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City joined the Environmental Resilience Institute’s 2019 Resilience Cohort
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Staff conducted local government operations and community-wide inventories
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Staff presented results to City officials
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The City of Fishers completed government operations and community-wide inventories for the calendar years 2015 and 2018. The government operations inventory calculated the emissions from government-owned facilities and equipment, and the community-wide inventory analyzed the emissions coming from various sources within the community. The City decided to measure its emissions to establish a baseline, which could be used to track future emissions and plan for emissions reductions. The completed inventories identified the sources of greenhouse gas emissions and trends over time.
City staff presented the idea of measuring the City’s emissions to Mayor Scott Fadness. With mayoral approval, the City joined the Environmental Resilience Institute’s 2019 Resilience Cohort with 13 other Indiana local governments. The 2019 Cohort provided technical assistance and support to 14 Indiana communities as they conducted community-wide greenhouse gas inventories. As members of the Cohort, the City received resources and weekly webinar trainings from ERI and ICLEI. ICLEI is a nonprofit organization that helps local governments make improvements in sustainability and resilience, with a core focus on greenhouse gas measurement and tracking. For more than 25 years, ICLEI has helped communities reduce emissions and become healthier, stronger, more equitable, and more prepared.
The City chose to conduct both a local government operations inventory and a community-wide inventory. The community-wide inventories measured emissions generated by activities within Fishers’ city limits, such as waste generation, electricity usage, and transportation. The government operations inventories provided a more detailed look at emissions associated with the operation of City government, such as the City’s vehicle fleet, energy usage, and processes used in the City’s water and wastewater facilities. The City conducted inventories for the years 2015 and 2018 to get a sense of how emissions changed over a short timeframe. Fishers used the Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories, an internationally accepted document that outlines the steps for completing a community-wide inventory, and they used the Local Government Operations Protocol for measuring the emissions under its own roof.
Following the steps outlined in the protocol documents, the City reached out to local businesses, energy utilities, and other stakeholders to gather data such as electricity use, fuel type and use, the amount of waste in landfills, and wastewater and water treatment processes. In instances where stakeholders were unable to provide local data, the City scaled down statewide or regional data. The City then entered the collected data into ICLEI’s ClearPath software to calculate emissions. At the conclusion of the inventories, staff presented the information to City officials.
A one-time fee of $500 was required for participation in the Resilience Cohort, which was covered by the City budget.
The process took six months from the time the project began to the presentation of results.
The inventory did not explicitly address equity and justice. However, the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions disproportionately affect lower-income and other at-risk neighborhoods. The City can use this greenhouse gas data to help vulnerable populations in the future.
From 2015 to 2018, population increased five percent while community-wide greenhouse gas emissions increased one percent, meaning that per capita emissions declined over the time period. 2015 per capita emissions were 14.09 MT carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), and 2018 per capita emissions were 13.57 MT CO2e. However, total greenhouse gas emissions are the most important metric, and the City expects total emissions to increase as the population grows if the City does not mindfully work to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions.
With 43 percent of community-wide emissions in 2015 and 44 percent in 2018, residential energy was the highest emitting sector, followed by transportation and commercial energy. Government operations emissions accounted for one percent of total community-wide emissions and increased by four percent between 2015 and 2018. The main source of the government operations emissions was water and wastewater treatment facilities, comprising 55 percent of City emissions in 2015 and 54 percent in 2018.
Main takeaways include an opportunity for the City government to lead by example by reducing emissions from its operations and addressing large emission sources in the community. For example, transportation is expected to be a growing sector of emissions in Fishers and therefore should be prioritized in emissions reduction efforts. Prior to the inventory, the City had implemented some strategies to combat rising greenhouse gas emissions, including replacing old bulbs with LED lighting in municipal buildings. With the 2015 inventory, the City established an emissions baseline and proposed the long-term goal of reducing government greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050.
The City also participated in the 2020 Resilience Cohort. As part of the Cohort, the City conducted a climate vulnerabilities assessment and started integrating climate action planning into the update of its comprehensive plan.
Some challenges associated with the project included having to extrapolate and estimate some of the data. In some instances, stakeholders were reluctant to provide data due to privacy concerns. City staff had to scale down statewide data to obtain the relevant information, which is common in the greenhouse gas inventory process. For example, transportation data was not available for Fishers specifically, so staff used figures on average vehicle miles traveled state-wide to estimate local data based on population.
Steven Chybowski, the City of Fishers Public Administrations Fellow who conducted the greenhouse gas inventory gave the following advice:
“You can’t manage what you don’t measure, so you need to get a baseline before you implement reduction actions. You also may not always get the exact data you’re looking for, so you need to make a plan B, make adjustments, and don’t give up.”
Trevor Preddy
Planner II, Planning and Zoning
City of Fishers, IN
preddyt@fishers.in.us
317-595-3137
