CRFPO Carbon Footprint

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – Columbia River Fisheries Program Office (CRFPO) convened a Carbon Footprint Team in 2013.  The goal of this team is to quantify, track, and make recommendations toward reducing the office carbon footprint.  To this end, we established a process that involved establishing objectives, meeting regularly, establishing contacts outside of CRFPO to collect information, conducting an energy audit, adopting a carbon footprint calculator, quantifying the office carbon footprint, and developing recommendations to reduce that carbon footprint.  The energy audit was conducted by Clark Public Utilities and provided some insight to ways we could easily reduce our carbon footprint.  The carbon footprint calculator was adopted from Seattle Climate Partnership, and provided a platform to easily input data so that the office carbon footprint could be quantified.  The CRFPO carbon footprint for FY 2013 was approximately 350 metric tons of CO₂.  Recommendations developed included ways of reducing the person commute between home and office, changes to the office vehicle fleet, and reducing electricity usage, all of which represented the biggest sinks to the CRFPO carbon footprint.  This approach developed and implemented by the CRFPO Carbon Footprint Team identifies a way that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service field offices can easily quantify and track their carbon footprint, and can be a meaningful step toward making changes that decrease the carbon footprint for the agency.

 Read the CFT Carbon Footprint Report

Submitted by Michael Hudson