Climate and Air Pollution Planning Assistant (CAPPA)

ICLEI will launch the Climate and Air Pollution Planning Assistant (CAPPA) tool in 2008 to assist local government leaders in developing customized plans for reducing climate and local air pollution based on the collective advice of local governments throughout the ICLEI network. This tool will be publicly available in both a web interface and downloadable Excel edition, and will greatly speed the development and adoption of climate action plans and, fostering faster, prioritized implementation of emissions reducing actions.

 WHAT IS IT

 

CAPPA provides a comprehensive, customizable and expandable library of emissions reduction strategies relevant for local government audiences, as well as decision support capability to assist local government users in identifying strategies for inclusion in their own emissions reduction plans. CAPPA will be available to local governments in both online and downloadable Excel formats.

CAPPA provides information and quantification tools for over 100 distinct emissions reduction strategies. Default assumptions regarding average degree of implementation and resulting performance of each strategy are based on real-world data from other U.S. communities and a variety of expert sources.

HOW TO USE IT

Browse the Library
There are two ways to use CAPPA. Users may browse through the library of emissions reduction strategies to explore a specific strategy of interest. Each strategy is featured on a unique page within the library containing a description of the strategy; links to resources and examples of implementation by other communities; calculators enabling analysis of emissions reduction potential, costs and benefits; and information on how the strategy tends to perform from the perspective of several key decision criteria.

Develop a Plan
Users may also develop a customized emissions reduction plan focused on either government operations or the community as a whole. This plan can be optimized around any of six pollutants (greenhouse gases, NOx, SOx, CO, VOCs, PM10). The user is able to enter emissions inventory and target data, customize assumptions regarding potential degree of implementation and expected performance of each strategy if applied locally, express the degree to which several decision criteria are valued, and generate a custom list of potential emissions reduction strategies drawing from these inputs and the tool's assumptions about the performance of each strategy.

A STARTING POINT

CAPPA is designed to assist with the identification and analysis of near and medium term emissions reduction strategies. It is intended to provide a starting point for selecting strategies to include in a government operations or community-scale reduction plan. It is not intended to replace a more complex analysis utilizing more detailed emissions source data and advanced models needed for estimating costs and benefits associated with complex strategies (e.g., whole-building energy retrofits and land use/transit planning decisions).

All results from CAPPA should be vetted and analyzed appropriately before adoption as an emissions reduction plan. All default assumptions contained in this tool regarding the degree of implementation, costs and resource impacts, and performance factors for each strategy should be customized to the user's local circumstances.

Version 1.0 of CAPPA will be released in Spring 2008.

 

ICLEI is proud to announce the winners of its Decision Support Tool Challenge!

The following local governments received free registration to the 2008 ICLEI Local Action Summit for submitting surveys that detailed 10 or more greenhouse gas reduction measures:

• Charlottesville, VA 
• Hillsborough County, FL 
• Las Vegas, NV
• Nashua, NH

• Whatcom County, WA
  
  

Local governments were asked to tell us about their experiences implementing greenhouse gas reduction measures. The collected information will be included in the Decision Support Tool database, which will assist local governments in creating their local climate action plans. Along with free registration, ICLEI recognizes Charlottesville, Hillsborough County, Las Vegas, Nashua and Whatcom County as Core Research Partners of the Decision Support Tool. Their contribution will be noted within the tool upon its release. The data provided by each Core Research Partner will make the tool more robust and effective for all ICLEI members.

 

If you did not have a chance to submit a survey in 2007, click here to contribute data on local climate action measures that will be included in future versions of the Decision Support Tool.