Imagine a world in which communities anywhere can measure and compare their impact on the environment. Think about it - those discussions in Copenhagen or Cancun about global targets would suddenly mean something on your doorstep.
The launch of the Climometer - a device to measure and display energy use from a community of any size, whether a school or a whole town, for the first time makes energy use and greenhouse gas emissions visible as they happen.
The science can tell us what level of greenhouse gases is sustainable across the planet. As individuals there’s any number of ways to estimate the impact of how we live. But - until now - there’s not really been anything in between.
And, according to Olav Stav, the project lead from Stavanger Kommune, this is a huge oversight. “It’s actually at the community level that the concept of a ‘carbon footprint’ - measuring your environmental impact - can have a real meaning. The global picture is too distant from what we can impact on, and the individual figures can be misleading. How do we assign energy from what we buy? What about the energy from the shops and services we use? Actually, its much more accurate to think of energy use at a community level; as social animals we can’t help but overlap in our impacts.”
The ANSWER project has taken a giant step towards this goal by launching the Climometer in Norway. This Climometer (or Climate Barometer - a measure of the pressure we put on our environment) shows real-time energy use for the whole town of Stavanger in southern Norway. The live data display compiles information from the electric grid and traffic monitoring to automatically update a display of energy use as its happening.
As well as just showing the data, the Climometer can provide helpful information to place it in context (for example local or national sustainability targets) and information on how behaviour changes can reduce the total. The public display on the Climometer is linked to a website (www.klimameter.no) that provides further detail on what the data means, and links beyond: the raw data is only the start.
Over the Summer, this tool will be extended to two more towns: Växjö (Sweden) and Ipswich (UK). This step will enable the inhabitants to compare their results with those in other countries.
Växjö are widely regarded as a prime candidate for the title of Europe’s Greenest City. Now, that title is going to be put to the test with hard numbers on display for everyone to see.
An adapted version of the programme is already being used in schools in East Anglia (UK), Växjö (Sweden), and the Stavanger region of Norway. Armed with this information, the students are challenged to discover the causes of their school’s impact, identify ways of reducing it, and learn from their partners abroad. Issues such as one school having a higher energy use but lower carbon footprint lead on to a discussion of the energy mix and the role of national government in a region’s impact.
Project Manager, Ned Harrison, concedes that they still don’t have all the answers. “This was a hugely ambitious step to take, and we didn’t really have anyone we could copy it from. Our vision is that this becomes a part of the information in every town, and that the data becomes more and more comprehensive and immediate. We’ve proved it can work - now we’re challenging others to step in and improve our model”.