
by Warren Karlenzig
Reposted from WorldChanging
While personal carbon calculators are turning into a dime-a-dozen offering
across the web, the unveiling of Zerofootprint’s
carbon counter at the C40 Climate Summit last week ushers in a new era of a
large scale web-based data warehousing that can aggregate carbon emission
information from city government, companies, universities, neighborhoods,
groups or families. [Full disclosure: Zerofootprint provided offsets for the Worldchanging
book tour in 2006.]
Toronto Mayor David Miller announced that his city would be using the tool,
called Zerofootprint
Toronto, to calculate carbon emissions for the city's 50,000 employees this
July. The free tool will also be available to others in the city, so that it
begins to build a “bottom-up” analysis of carbon emissions complementing the
“top-down” analysis cities, counties and local government are currently engaged
in with groups such as another Toronto-based non-profit, ICLEI.
The mayor said Torontoans will be able to use the Internet-based tool to
calculate their own carbon footprint--which includes the amount of energy and
water used, waste generated, how they get around, consumption habits and food
choices. Results can then be aggregated and sliced and diced so that profiles
of city, neighborhood to glean personal carbon footprints. Zerofootprint runs
on a database architecture developed by billion-dollar software company
Business Objects, said Zerofootprint
founder and CEO Ron Dembo, so it can scale up to millions of users because
of its enterprise software backend.
ICLEI, which has a membership of over 550 local governments worldwide, is
also updating its limited-user circa 1990s carbon emissions software to a tool
accessible on the web that can run local government carbon calculations and
data reports. The international non-profit is working with Microsoft to release
the software by the end of 2007, according to a Microsoft executive.
Continue reading "Carbon Tools Scale up for City-Wide Footprinting" »
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