Seeking Information on Baselining the Current Energy and Environment Practices of an Organization

Hi Olena,

I recommend looking at Alan AtKisson's work. He has been at the forefront of sustainability indicators work for nearly 20 years. The AtKisson Group's web site is http://www.atkisson.com/. You may also want to search for articles written by AtKisson and/or by Donella Meadows.

Good luck!
Edith Ben-Horin
T.R.E.E.S. Project Associate TreePeople

Olena:

I was involved in a state-level sustainability indicators project in PA a couple of years ago. In looking around at other indicator projects, we found that they are often dead-ends - when development of a set of indicators is identified as a primary goal, then things tend to stall after the indicators are rolled out with great fanfare. To avoid having the metric turn into the product, focus on the question "indicators of WHAT?" The best advice I know regarding indicators is not to start with the indicators themselves. Instead, start by pulling together a group of people with diverse experience in the system - teachers, custodians, administrators, students, groundskeepers, parents - and develop a consensus view of what "success" looks like. What does "system-wide operational environmental literacy" mean in practice? What basic components can it be broken into? What would constitute "success" for each component? Who needs to do what? Once you've figured out where you want to go (desired outcomes), figuring out how to track your progress (indicators) is easy. Using this approach, the outcomes stay front-and-center, and it is more likely that the process will continue on past the indicator development step. (By the way, a paper on lessons-learned from the PA indicators project was published in Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, v. 94, p. 179-191, 2004.)

Good luck!
-- Kathi Beratan
Research Scientist Nicholas School
Duke University Durham, NC
[email protected]

I'm not sure about the type of baseline you are looking for - but as you are a PEng, I suspect it is not regarding the environmental knowledge of your students. If you are looking for information for energy and environment knowledge of the operators of your schools - I would suggest looking at the Canadian Institute for Energy Training http://www.cietcanada.com/energymanage.htm. The material is very useful in conducting a fairly easy "organizational assessment" of how well an organization manages energy. The website has an 'energy matrix' of six categories where you can rate an organization from zero to four on how well it is managing energy. You can also extend this assessment tool to other environmental or even sustainability areas - you could substitute issues such as water or maybe recycling or indoor air quality, or the environment more generally for anywhere the assessment tool uses the word energy (though some categories may be less relevant for other non-energy issues). This tool was originally developed in the UK and is used as part of Natural Resources Canada's "Dollards to Sense" energy workshops http://oee.nrcan.gc.ca/industrial/training-awareness/index.cfm When I took the workshop I remember seeing the tool used to rate organizations before and after they implemented organization changes - and increases in the ratings was strongly correlated with decreased energy use. I'd also recommend the Government of Canada's Guide to Implementing an Energy Efficiency Awareness Program. http://oee.nrcan.gc.ca/publications/infosource/pub/ici/eii/m144-22-2003e ..cfm?attr=20

hopefully that is useful
(contact me if you want some further ideas, as we are in the same city..)
Murray Birt

Consultant Climate Change Central
Suite 100, 999-8th Street SW
Calgary, Alberta T2R 1J5
www.climatechangecentral.com
403.517.2711 (phone)
403.517.2727 (fax)