Philipstown’s Sink, Store, Reduce, Offset GHG inventory was developed in partnership between resident-action group, The Climate Smart Communities Task Force of Philipstown, local community empowerment nonprofit the Ecological Citizen’s Project, ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability USA.
Altogether, the inventory establishes an innovative baseline from which the community can explore implications for achieving local carbon neutrality.
The innovative GHG inventory is one of the first in New York State to use local data to measure the lifecycle carbon-emission associated with the goods and services residents consume and to estimate the work of natural resources to remove and store carbon from the atmosphere, in addition to traditional approaches that quantify emissions associated with transportation, energy production and other sectors. Taken together, consumption-based and production-based emissions inventories provide a powerful starting point to evaluate climate action: Whereas traditional methods highlight jurisdictional control of emissions sources, consumption is about the control that exists at the household level.
