Monitoring Module User Guide (Draft)

Detailed Guidance Using ClearPath September 2014

Table of Contents ClearPath Monitoring Module ...................................................................................................................... 3

Bottom Up Approaches............................................................................................................................. 3

Top Down Approaches .............................................................................................................................. 4

Top Down and Bottom Up ........................................................................................................................ 4

Module Features ........................................................................................................................................... 4

Reports ...................................................................................................................................................... 4

Implementation Details ........................................................................................................................ 5

Implementation Status ......................................................................................................................... 5

Implementation Progress...................................................................................................................... 5

Implementation Efficacy ....................................................................................................................... 6

Projected to Actual Summary ............................................................................................................... 7

Projected to Actual Details ................................................................................................................... 7

Indicator Monitoring ............................................................................................................................. 8

Monitoring Calculators ............................................................................................................................. 8

Record Parameters ............................................................................................................................... 9

Implementation Status ....................................................................................................................... 10

Financing ............................................................................................................................................. 10

Impacts Achieved ................................................................................................................................ 11

Evaluation Details ............................................................................................................................... 11

Outputs ............................................................................................................................................... 12

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................... 13

ClearPath Monitoring Module Performance monitoring of efforts to reduce greenhouse gases can take a variety of forms depending on the specific questions being asked. It is often the case that in order to develop a complete understanding of the change in emissions levels over time, several complimentary approaches are typically necessary. Approaches to monitoring can generally be categorized as bottom up or top down.

Bottom up approaches are useful for understanding the performance of individual actions. They answer questions related to whether an action had its intended impact, whether it did so in a cost effective manner, and other lessons learned from its implementation. This view is highly useful to further inform future decision making on where to invest in the next wave of emissions reduction strategies. However within the limited view of an individual action or group of actions, changes occurring at the citywide scale or some other higher level may obscure the impact of those actions when looking at the aggregate change in emissions.

The ultimate measure of progress towards effective emissions reductions is whether total emissions from an inventory have improved. Regular performance of emissions re-inventories are a necessary part of performance monitoring to provide the top down perspective.

Taken together these two approaches can inform the scale of the effort required to continue upon the reduction pathways required to meet their targets as well as the type of actions that are proving to be the most effective. However, these approaches may not lead to a complete understanding of the causal factors that are driving the changes from one inventory to the next. Changes in fuel prices, weather, and other factors are likely to change the behavior of individuals and drive some degree of variability in emissions levels from one year to another. Accounting for those types of changes requires highly detailed data about the community and advanced statistical analyses that are presently beyond the scope of ClearPath. Even with a full accounting of those exogenous drivers of emissions, the trends in emissions over several inventories are more important than those from one year to another.

The features added for the Monitoring Module of ClearPath are focused on examining those trends over multiple inventories as well as assessing the performance of individual actions.

Bottom Up Approaches Numerous approaches to assessing the impact of individual actions exist. The approach that should be taken will depend largely on the type of action, the data available, and the resources available to perform the analysis. A general rule is that the larger the action, the more complicated the evaluation required to properly assess it will be. Due to the nature of the work involved in performing evaluations, ClearPath cannot provide definitive analysis of the impact of a particular measure on the activity driving emissions. That information must be developed from an appropriately scoped study for the action. ClearPath provides a location where the results of a range of actions can be recorded along with all the other data related to greenhouse gas mitigation are stored and where it can be further analyzed alongside that other information. ClearPath will allow you to record the most critical details of outside analyses and analyze them to compare the effectiveness across the many actions being taken in your community.

Top Down Approaches The ultimate measure as to whether your community of government operations is on track to meeting its emissions reduction goals is the results of periodic re-inventories. Even while the effect of the actions you have already implemented may be highly effective, they may be at least partially overshadowed by growth or other changes happening in the community. Through periodic re-inventory you can understand whether the scope of your Climate Action Plan and related initiatives are likely to be successful over the long term and whether more attention, or more directed attention at specific sectors is needed. The use of re-inventories is limited in that it can only demonstrate total performance, but not all the factors that drove the change.

Indicators are one way of adding some explanatory information to the results of an inventory, however. Indicators can normalize the results of two inventories for the changes where the primary driver of the result has occurred and the relationship is direct. One example is residential energy use. The primary driver of emissions in this case is the number of households. By supplying the number of households that are included in each inventory, observed differences in residential energy use can be partially explained. More importantly, performance improvement can be revealed with this type of indicator.

Top Down and Bottom Up Both approaches are needed to develop a complete picture of the forces that are driving year to year variations in emissions levels as well as long term trends. As ClearPath continues to evolve, new features will be explored to apply both simultaneously and give users additional information to better inform decision making. The primary limitation to that vision is consistently and widely available sources of data with which to fill key gaps. These include changes in economic drivers at the local scale, but more importantly an understanding of the local response to changes in those drivers. This can only be performed where rich datasets is widely available

Module Features To support monitoring activities, two significant features have been added to ClearPath. First, Monitoring Records can now be created to record information about the implementation and impact of local actions taken to reduce emissions. Monitoring Records can now be created and accessed from the Monitoring Tab. Second, a new series of reports designed to utilize the data contained in those records along with data from inventories and planning scenarios to reveal the individual achievements of actions and overall progress.

The organization of the remainder of this user guide is first to introduce the types of reports that can now be generated in the ClearPath Reports tab and then illustrate how to use the Monitoring Records calculators to populate those reports with useful information.

Reports Monitoring reports are located in the ClearPath Reports tab and are displayed separately from Inventory Reports in their own tab. Similar to Inventory Reports, the results from each can be viewed in an html

table on the screen or exported as a .csv file for further analysis. Some of the charts also display visual representations of the data in charts.

Several report types require the user to select either an Inventory or Planning Scenario to display the data. This is especially true for the comparison reports where there may be several instances of the projected impact of measures depending on the settings of the scenario.

Figure 1 Monitoring Reports Selection

The sections below provide additional detail on the contents of each of the Monitoring reports available.

Implementation Details The Implementation Details Report is similar to other detailed reports in ClearPath. This report will export all the inputs and outputs for each monitoring record that exists in the tool without any summarizing.

Implementation Status The Implementation Status Report contains a subset of the data in the Details Report, focusing on only the data related to implementation. This subset of fields includes:

• Record Name

• Sector Category

• Project Status

• Point Person

• Next Steps

• Implementation Notes

If good record keeping is maintained, this report can provide a useful way to quickly report on progress of actions taken throughout the city at a moment’s notice.

Implementation Progress This report is designed to compare monitoring records with a related measure from an action plan to illustrate whether the level of implementation has kept pace with the expected level of implementation specified in the Reduction Measure.

Figure 2. Implementation Progress Report

This report will only produce data where Monitoring Records have been linked with a companion a reduction record that is active in a Planning Scenario during a calendar year that the Monitoring Record represents. To read more about connecting Monitoring and Planning records, please see the Monitoring Calculators section of this User Guide. When running the report, you must select which plan you wish to compare to since the projected implementation of the Reduction Measure will depend on the settings of each Planning Scenario.

Implementation Efficacy Similar to the Implementation Progress report, this report compares the expected emissions reduction from a Reduction Measure with the achieved reductions recorded in a linked Monitoring Record. It also includes a comparison of the activity reduction. This will occur for each calendar year which has a Monitoring Record associated with it.

Figure 3. Implementation Efficacy Report

This report will only produce data where Monitoring Records have been linked with a companion Planning Record. To read more about connecting Monitoring and Planning records, please see the

Monitoring Calculators section of this User Guide. When running the report, you must select which plan you wish to compare to since the projected impact of the Reduction Measure will depend on the settings of each Planning Scenario.

Projected to Actual Summary Complementing the data produced in the Indicator Monitoring report, this report will illustrate the high level view of emissions by Sector Category for a single inventory compared to the projected level of emissions for the matching calendar year from a planning scenario.

Figure 4. Projected to Actual Emissions Summary Report

This report can be used to illustrate how closely the actual emissions from a re-inventory track with projections. This can be applied to either a reduction planning scenario or business-as-usual forecast. Note that while the selection options list contains Reduction Plan record names, comparison to business as usual can be created by having a Reduction Plan record defined with no measures applied.

Projected to Actual Details This report is a variation of the Projected to Actual summary report which drills further down to display comparisons of projected and actual emissions at the Forecast Series level. As a reminder, Forecast Series’ are the line item activities that are projected in the course of creating a Forecast in ClearPath.

In addition to displaying the data, a chart is generated which compares the actual and projected emissions summarized at the sector level. Users can change which sector is being displayed with the picklist in the upper left corner of the chart.

Figure 5. Projected to Actual Sector Detail Chart

Indicator Monitoring The Indicator Monitoring Report pulls data from Inventory Records pertaining specifically to the indicator values that can be produced while creating records there. The comparison of indicator values over time can give more meaningful information about emissions reduction progress than by looking at inventory totals alone. The results of this report will group records by the calculator from which they came from as well as by Record Name. By using a consistent naming convention of record names, the indicator values for a particular emissions source or activity can be viewed from one inventory to the next.

Figure 6. Indicator Report

Monitoring Calculators Within the Monitoring Module, there are “calculator” pages that should be familiar to users of ClearPath who have used similar calculators to record inventory records and planned reduction measures. To access the calculators, simply select the sector category for the measure you wish to create a record for from the Monitoring Tab. This will open a calculator designed to capture monitoring data relevant to measures in that sector. There are far fewer Monitoring calculators to choose from than are available in other parts of the tool because they have been built with the flexibility to be related to any kind of measure within the sector.

Figure 7. Selecting Monitoring Calculators

Monitoring calculators offer the opportunity to enter a range of different types of information about a particular action that has been taken in the community. The information collected in different parts of a monitoring calculator can be used for a variety of purposes. The reports described in the previous section are populated largely with information from one of the input sections of a Monitoring Record. The remainder of this user guide describes those sections and how they relate to the data for each report.

Record Parameters In order to run both the Implementation Progress and Implementation Efficacy reports, each Monitoring Record needs to be connected to Reduction plan record which it represents. To do so, simply pick the name of the Planning record which should be related. When this selection is made, ClearPath will dynamically pick main driver of the reduction plan measure and display it as an input on the page. In the example below, the selection of a building energy code connected the field for quantity of building space constructed or renovated to meet the code. The data entered into this field is necessary for the Implementation Progress report. That report illustrates whether the scope of effort for the action is maintaining pace with what was planned to occur in a previously developed Planning Scenario. The Implementation Efficacy report does not require any unique inputs other than the total emissions reduced from the measure and it is possible to link just emissions impacts if the related implementation value is unknown or in incompatible units to the framing that was used to define a reduction measure in the Planning module. Also note that this field is not required. Monitoring records can be created that do not link back to any estimations performed in the development of a plan, however their values will not be reflected in the Implementation Progress or Implementation Efficacy Report.

In addition to linking to a Reduction Measure Record, one other unique input is available for Monitoring records. A year selection is also needed to represent which year the savings apply to. This selection will determine where the reductions associated with the measure are applied in the Implementation Progress and Implementation Efficacy reports. A new record is needed for each year of implementation that is being monitored.

Figure 8. Connecting a Monitoring Record to a Reduction Measure Record

Implementation Status The Implementation Status report provides information about the current status of each action either being currently implemented or already completed. The section of the calculator titled “Implementation Status” contains the fields that will populate that report. By maintaining up-to-date information of the related fields to implementation status, you can provide readily accessible status reports on across all actions in response to requests from the public or other decision makers.

Figure 9. Implementation Status Inputs

Financing The Financing section allows you to record the financial impacts of action by recording the costs and benefits of the action. This data is used in the computation of the cost effectiveness calculation output for the record. That output can be particularly useful when making decisions on whether to continue or possibly expand a given measure. Again by maintaining records of the financing source of each action in the plan, you and other ClearPath users in your jurisdiction can have ready access to this information should requests for it arise.

Figure 10. Financing Inputs

Impacts Achieved The Impacts Achieved section of the tool will allow you to record the outcome of the action. In some places, namely energy related calculations, you can enter reductions in the greenhouse gas generating activity (energy use) and emissions will be calculated for you. However, in other sections it may not always be straightforward what the mechanism of the reduction was to reduce emissions and in those cases the achieved emissions reduction should be entered directly. The inputs required for each calculator are dynamic based on the type of reduction being recorded and will only present relevant fields to the type of reduction. The notes field provides a good place for additional information about the measure that isn’t captured in other more restrictive fields.

Figure 11. Impact Achieved Inputs

Evaluation Details The evaluation section is a critical section to be completed for actions where emissions impact outcomes have been achieved. The information recorded here gives provenance to the claim of having achieved a reduction as well as critical details about how the results of the achievement were determined which may inform how that information is interpreted. Information recorded here could

describe verification procedures used in the monitoring of specific efficiency measures to large scale program evaluations of actions implemented community-wide. Entries in this section could reference consultant reports, performance contract reporting, or other sources where the outcomes of an action have been studied and quantified. At the bottom of each calculator, the option exists to upload a file associated with the record. Taking advantage of this option can ensure that other users in your jurisdiction have access to the complete history of the action.

Figure 12. Evaluation Detail Inputs

Outputs There are many outputs associated with each monitoring record because of their potential to represent emissions reductions associated with any forecast series so that the Comparison and Implementation Efficacy reports can be generated. In most cases, the majority of the outputs for any individual record will remain 0, and will only populate with the selections made by the user regarding target of the impact of the measure.

Figure 13. Example Monitoring Calculator Outputs

Many of the outputs will also simply reflect the values inputted from an externally performed evaluation. The monitoring records themselves are largely a place for recording impacts, their power comes when they are combined with other pieces of information to tell a larger story.

Conclusion Within the larger context of voluntary actions to address climate change, there is an increasing call for reporting. ClearPath users that have recorded their information in the application will find it easier to assemble the information in order to participate. In the future automatic reporting to registries may become a reality. In the coming years the expected quality and granularity of the data available from which to monitor progress is likely to improve significantly. As it does, the ability of ClearPath users to perform deeper analyses and attribute changes in greenhouse gas emissions performance with much greater precision. Those communities with records already created in the Monitoring Module will be much further ahead in already having accounted for a number of known changes to their emissions profile. In the meantime, maintaining records of actions taken within ClearPath will help to ensure that all of your community’s energy and climate protection activities from inventories through planning and monitoring are all housed in one location and easily accessible to anyone assisting in your efforts.