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A consumption-based emissions accounting method is being developed alongside usage-based accounting, and it will be ready by the end of 2022. Consumption-based accounting is based on the municipality’s household consumption of energy, goods and services as well as investments and public administration consumption. The physical location of where emissions are caused plays no role in this case. The calculations account for the greenhouse gas emissions of the entire production chain of goods and services.
Prior to the publication of the consumption-based accounting method, regional emissions data for 1990 as well as preliminary data for 2021 will be published. For the municipal greenhouse gas emissions scenario tool, a new baseline scenario is defined, an extension of the agricultural scenario is implemented and the integration of economic indicators is tested to determine the cost-effectiveness of emissions reduction measures.
In order to promote the transparency of science and climate work and safeguard the quality of the calculations, a development project is also underway to automate calculation and open the calculation data and codes where data protection so permits. This work will be carried out in an open and widely used R programming environment.
The work enables the combination of the programming code that performs the calculations and a plain language narrative explaining the calculations into a clear document, where the calculations can be developed and specified step by step. As for the open data, the calculation documents will be published for everyone to view and use. The documents are saved in the commonly used HTML or PDF formats and made available to everyone.
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Further information
Santtu Karhinen, Senior Research Scientist, Finnish Environment Institute, tel. +358 29 525 1889, firstname.lastname@syke.fi