Climate Action Decision Support Tool
The Climate Action Decision Support Tool is an online open-source tool for climate budgeting. It helps cities develop and prioritize climate actions as a part of their regular budgeting process.
The tool is developed in the Climate-4-CAST project (2023-2026) funded by the EU Interreg BSR. The project has several city partners from the Baltic Sea Region testing, using, and improving the tool.
Features and functionalities
The Climate Action Decision Support Tool has two main features: 1) an overview of climate actions and their climate and economic impacts, 2) a visualisation of city-level emissions projections by GPC sectors.
An overview of different climate actions and their individual climate and economic impacts. This feature helps cities analyse the effectiveness of climate measures, prioritise climate actions and understand in-depth the various impacts of climate actions. The feature shows greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption and costs and savings of climate actions.
A visualisation of city-level emissions projections and time trends by GPC sectors. This feature helps cities to track and project the achievement of their climate neutrality goals and emissions targets in different scenarios and course of action.
The tool focuses on providing visualization of timelines of the most important outcomes of interest such as time trends of city-level greenhouse gas emissions by GPC sectors, time trends of activity data (such as energy consumption or vehicle kilometrage) and time trends of economic costs and benefits of climate actions. All calculations and visualisations are updated instantaneously when any changes to input data is made.
The tool main features are interlinked. Emissions impact of a specific action is based on the projection of emission intensities. Also, the actions are included in chosen scenarios have their indicated impact on the indicated activity data and the results are shown in the city-level emissions projection. For example, an action that reduces energy consumption will refer to the emission factor of said energy form in the city-level emissions projections to determine the amount of emissions avoided. At the same time, the action will reduce the amount of energy consumed in the city-level emissions projection resulting in lower total emissions in the affected sector.
The GPC Protocol (the Greenhouse Gas Protocol for Local Communities) is used for calculating emissions inventories and future projections. This is the most common protocol, which is used by most of the cities who do greenhouse gas inventories. It has a standard structure for emission sectors, and most emissions are calculated by multiplying activities and related emission factors. For further details about the GPC protocol see: GHG Protocol for Cities.
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