Carbon Accounting For Boston Businesses: Strategies For Sustainability And Profit – Massachusetts aims to get 80 percent of its energy from carbon-free sources by 2050, but Boston has an even more ambitious goal for that year: to be 100 percent carbon-free.

Since 2017, a team of city experts, outside consulting firms and Boston University’s Institute for Sustainable Energy has researched how the city can do this and what technological and social justice challenges it might face. Their findings appear in a report released Tuesday by the Boston Green Ribbon Commission.

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The central message is that reaching carbon zero requires maximum energy efficiency and 100 percent clean electricity. The report identifies four sectors that will require radical changes to make this happen: buildings, transport, waste and energy.

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1. Buildings: “Nearly every building in Boston will need to undergo retrofits that comprehensively and dramatically reduce energy use.”

Boston is growing rapidly and the report says growth will require an additional 77,500 new housing units and 40 million square feet of non-residential floor space by 2050. Buildings account for more than two-thirds of the city’s emissions, so Boston needs to make big changes to reach carbon neutrality.

All new buildings must meet high energy performance standards. Existing buildings will require deep energy retrofits in addition to energy-efficient light bulbs and window replacements. Households must switch to electricity from oil and gas that is carbon-free or from renewable sources.

The technology to make these changes already exists and should be inexpensive. Making these changes should make the city more climate resilient, create jobs, lower utility bills and increase home prices.

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Changes require a lot of upfront capital. Big questions remain about how the city will help landlords and tenants pay for these upgrades, manage temporarily displaced people whose homes are being retrofitted, and make sure people don’t get the cost of newly renovated homes.

About 29 percent of Boston’s emissions come from the transportation sector, and 75 percent of those emissions come from private passenger vehicles.

The trend toward electric vehicles means that transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions are likely to drop by 40 percent by 2050, even if the city does nothing. The remaining 60 percent is difficult.

Move away from personal vehicles and towards public transport, walking and biking. The city should make streets more pedestrian- and bike-friendly, improve public transit, and impose new fees on parking and driving. Encourage population growth in “centrally located, walkable and transit-rich” areas of the city, while also reducing transit deserts. Cars, trucks, ferries, buses, trains – everything needs to be powered by electricity from sources that don’t emit greenhouse gases, and the city needs the infrastructure to support it. (The airplanes at Logan are not included in the scope of this report.)

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A cleaner and more efficient transport system can reduce obesity and asthma rates and reduce travel times. And as with building modifications, the necessary technology exists and is getting cheaper.

This would be costly and could affect low-income, disabled and elderly residents the most. And it’s unclear how the city will approach ride-hailing services, which the report notes “have the potential to worsen or improve [greenhouse gas] emissions, congestion and equity of access to mobility.”

The top shows Boston’s current emissions path, and the bottom shows the path to carbon neutrality. (Courtesy of Carbon Free Boston Report)

3. Waste: “Rethinking consumption to reduce waste production can significantly reduce [greenhouse gas] emissions at low cost.”

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About 75 percent of Boston’s waste goes to landfills or combustion facilities. The rest is “diverted” — recycled, reused, repaired or composted. Municipal waste makes up 6 percent of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions, so diverting more waste is key.

Divert more food, paper, plastic, metal, glass and other recyclable waste. Implement policies to reduce waste generation – for example, banning plastic bags. Reduce the amount of contaminated recycling. Right now, 20 percent of what the city puts into recycling goes into the trash.

Waste diversion is relatively inexpensive and much of the technology already exists. Plus, less waste means cleaner air and water for people who live near landfills and combustion facilities.

: Depending on how the city structures its fee/incentive program, low-income people may be hit the hardest. It also requires buy-in from everyone in town to make it work.

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4. Energy: “The city has good and improving opportunities to obtain clean electricity [but] defining a precise prescription is difficult … due to the uncertainty of future price and market conditions.”

By 2050, 80 percent of the electricity supplied to Massachusetts is expected to be carbon-free. To meet its goals, Boast must also derive another 20 percent from zero-carbon fuels.

Increase the number of rooftop solar panels. According to the report, solar will provide a fifth of the city’s power by 2050. Further research and development of energy storage systems and methods of decarbonizing or producing renewable gas fuels. Use renewable energy credits, power purchase agreements and other types of carbon credits to offset greenhouse gas emissions.

These changes will create economic opportunities and position Boston as a global leader in clean energy innovation. They will also reduce air pollution and lower utility bills; Citywide, residents could save up to $600 million annually by 2050.

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The proposed plan would increase electricity demand by about 12 percent, shift the timing of peak energy demand patterns and make the city more dependent on intermittent sources like solar and wind. Finding better ways to store energy will be important.

Top shows where Boston got its energy in 2015, and bottom: where Boston could get its energy in 2050. (Courtesy of Carbon Free Boston Report)

Great question. The Green Ribbon Commission will publish two companion documents in the next few months. One will consider social equity and the other will present the technical details underpinning the report.

Meanwhile, city officials will use the report to help update Boston’s Climate Action Plan. This process will include developing timelines and implementation strategies for new policies and programs, explains Carl Spector, commissioner of Boston’s Department of the Environment.

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“Do we need to change regulations? Do we need to change policies? Do we need to create programs in terms of incentives and training? Or in education and outreach? In all of these areas, [we’ll see] that in the next three to five years we need to grow faster and more There is a need to go deeper,” he says.

Exactly what these policies will look like, and how the costs and benefits will be distributed across the population, remains to be seen. But if the report makes one thing clear, it’s that the sooner the city acts, the sooner its residents will reap the cost, health and climate resilience benefits.

Click the audio player next to this story’s headline to listen to Morning Edition’s conversation with Boston’s environmental, energy and open space chief Chris Cook. Carbon accounting is the process of calculating, analyzing, measuring and reporting an organization’s greenhouse gas emissions. (GHG) emissions so that they are fully auditable. It is sometimes called greenhouse gas accounting, carbon auditing, carbon inventory or greenhouse gas inventory. Organizations, businesses, cities and many other organizations use carbon accounting to manage their carbon footprint.

Carbon accounting quantifies the amount of GHGs produced by private and public organizations to understand how much carbon they emit. It also measures what part of their operations is responsible for those emissions.

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This information is essential for organizations to disclose their climate impact, communicate their comprehensive environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) strategy, and facilitate informed decision-making as the world races toward net zero.

Today, organizations and journalists have many guidelines explaining what to measure, what data to collect and how to measure their carbon footprint. There are also many tools and solutions available to streamline the process and make data accessible and useful.

Climate impact disclosure isn’t just for big corporations. To truly reach net zero, every organization must measure its carbon footprint to make a global impact. In this guide, we look at everything you need to know about carbon accounting and why it’s important to start now.

Organizations need to measure their Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions to understand their impact. The Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHGP) established these scopes to streamline how we classify and measure emissions.

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Scopes 1 and 2 can be more easily reduced with changes such as switching to an electric vehicle fleet or purchasing renewable energy. These scopes can provide a straightforward way to begin your carbon accounting journey.

Space 3, on the other hand, is notoriously difficult to calculate and reduce. Emissions along the value chain can come from any entity, from your suppliers to your customers. However, this complexity creates opportunities to connect with others to find ways to reduce your collective carbon footprint.

Some large companies have also taken public steps to reduce emissions, recognizing the seriousness of space 3 emissions. For example, PepsiCo is committed to achieving net zero. They also said that their Space 3 emissions accounted for 78% of their global GHG emissions in 2020.

When looking at other companies, the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) found that only 11% of companies on the Forbes Global 2000 list have so far achieved their net zero targets.

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Avoided emissions, also known as ‘Scope 4 emissions’, are reductions

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