Carnegie Mellon University
IN-1: Innovation 1

Tools Being Developed for All Campuses
The following is a list of tools we have been developing since the "It's Not Easy Bring Green" student project course in 2008. Note that while these tools are publicly available, they are still in-progress while we search for resources to complete them. We are still building documentation and tutorials for these tools. They all require Adobe Flash to be installed. Please contact us (hsm@cmu.edu) if you have comments or questions.

Web-Based Tool to Determine Peer Institutions for Sustainability Plans

Recommended viewing tools only with a modern browsers, (E.g. Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari).

As noted in the Initiatives Comparison summary of the "It's Not Easy Being Green" project, an important component of any planning exercise is an assessment of where a school stands in comparison to its peers. For traditional educational activities schools have many resources and lists of peer institutions. For example, schools compare to others in the same Carnegie Classification, same athletic conference, same type of campus, etc. For sustainability evaluations, determining who your peers are is not as obvious.

Using publicly available information from the US Department of Education (specifically the IPEDS database), we developed this tool to help schools find a small set of schools for which they could compare their performance. In addition, we have combined data on climate zones, because comparing to schools with radically different climates makes little sense. For our own campus, in some non-environmental benchmarking we often compare ourselves to Stanford or Berkeley, but they have much different heating and cooling loads for buildings than we do based on their location, and thus their energy use is very different - we would not want to compare against them for this reason. The web-based tool also considers climate zones in filtering potential peer institutions.

Web-Based Tool to Develop Campus Climate Action Plans

This tool will import a greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory (e.g., from the popular Clean Air Cool Planet Campus Calculator) and help schools develop an action plan to meet a certain reduction target or budget amount. When asked in the demo, the Plan ID is "admin" and the password is "pass".

Web-Based Tool to Compare Reported Campus Inventories
(link temporarily inactive while updating tool)

This tool compares the GHG emissions data reported by signatory schools of the Presidents' Climate Commitment to graphically show emissions, emissions per student, etc. While the PCC website shows average data by categories, we are developing this tool to act as a "quality control" feature to help schools identify when the data they are reporting may not be in line with existing averages and ranges, especially among their peer schools.

We anticipate eventually merging all of these tools together into a single social network-type web platform for campus sustainability stakeholders. We continue to seek funding for this activity.