Can my city calculate the benefits of a contemplated or completed action?
For many of the 163 GreenStep actions, yes. Within each best practice sheet is a “Benefits” section that lists, where we have indentified them, web sites with calculators of environmental, financial and social benefits of implementing the GreenStep actions, or similar actions. As of 2010 there exists one large, free, downloadable spreadsheet – The Climate & Air Pollution Planning Assistant (CAPPA) – with 120 separate calculators that are relevant to a majority of the 163 GreenStep City best practice actions. CAPPA can provide useful estimates for planning purposes, but it might not be an appropriate substitute to some other kind of measurement and verification in order to officially claim reductions. In some cases it appears that CAPPA simply uses educated, best estimates for what sort of greenhouse gas reductions a specific action can achieve. CAPPA has default settings for the degree to which a city government and/or a community would implement a specific action, and changeable facto