Methodology innovation: Climate Account for Aalborg University & Danish Universities

Aalborg University has initiated the creation of a GHG-account. The project uses the state of the art database global environmentally extended input-output database EXIOBASE. The projekt focus at developing and implementing tailored modelling relevant for the specific university context, and still preserving consistency with the mass-balanced. the project is coordinated with and feeds into the large database project Getting the data right (https://www.en.plan.aau.dk/getting-the-data-right/) which also is hosted by Aalborg University and DCEA.

The project has two main parts.

The first is to create a easily updatable GHG-account for Aalborg University, which is tailored to create relevant decision support for the most efficient climate gas reductions. Here the focus is to avoid the suboptimizations and to achieve global reductions (contrary to local reductions with global rebound-effects). This part further co-design the operationalisation of the assessment data into decision making with the relevant AAU stakeholders, whereof the Campus Service organisation play a central role.

The second part is the participation in a National Danish University Cooperation initiated by the University Director's Committee on behalf of the Rectors' College aiming at creating a national harmonised standard for the assessment of •Develop a model for a climate accounting that contains all the main sources of university CO2 emissions, including: scope 1 (direct emissions), 2 (indirect emissions from energy consumption: electricity, heat and dis-trict cooling) and 3 (value chain related emissions). The aim of Aalborg University in this work is to assure that the Universities, as leading knowledge producers, takes responsibility for applying the the up to date knowledge (State of the Art). It is the expectation that the project will set the global standard for this type of assessments of University GHG (& sustainability) accounts, and thereby also assist in fixing some of the issues with current assessment methods applied in the GHG protocol and Science Based Target approaches.

The project delivers 1) a climate gas account for Aalborg University, which is carefully designed to provide relevant decision support, 2) contributions to a cross university (DK) cooperation on creating a common danish model for University GHG-accounts including both direct and indirect emissions (Scope 1, 2, 3).

The project is ongoing