Methodology innovation: Climate Impact 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, and introduce a novel concept climate impact accounting. The project 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 three main parts.

The first is to create a easily updatable GHG impacts 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 to improve climate related decision making at AAU, hereunder relevant use of data. Focus is on communication and interpretation of climate impact account data (and traditional climate account data) to the relevant decision makers. A central aspect is to increase user-understanding of the connection between decisions and system changes. 

The third part is the participation in a National Danish University Cooperation (DKUNI ad hoc work group) initiated by the University Director's Committee on behalf of the Rectors' College aiming at creating a national harmonised  and shared University-standard for the assessment of organisational GHG footprint accounting (extract from workgroups terms of reference):
•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 support that the Universities, as leading knowledge producers, takes responsibility for applying State of the Art (and beyond) knowledge. It is the ambition that the project will set the global standard for this type of assessments of University GHG (& sustainability), and thereby also assist in fixing some of the issues with current assessment methods applied in general organisational footprinting (i.e. GHG protocol and Science Based Targets initiative).

The project delivers:
1) a climate gas account for Aalborg University, which is carefully designed to provide relevant decision support,
2) improve climate related decision making at AAU,
3) 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