You may have already done this from the first page of the Report Card form.

If you have not, then building strong relationships with an official or officials in your city government can help you get the information you need to complete the Climate Report Card, and help create allies within the city before you present your findings.

We suggest you start by working with someone in your city government to complete this questionnaire. The questionnaire is a PDF. You can download it and print it out, then use it for a meeting with a city official, or attach it to an email and send it to someone you've identified who can help you.

Download or print the questionnaire

Start first by searching online to see if your city has an environmental or sustainability department. If they do, you’ll want to meet with someone there. If not, you can call the city manager’s office or the main city line, using this phone script and ask them who to talk to.

Your phone script could go something like this:

“Hi, my name is ___________ and I am a leader with iMatter, a youth-led climate organization. As part of a campaign, we’re assessing [CITY]’s actions on issues that impact climate change, and I’m wondering if you can direct me to someone who can help me collect some data around environment and sustainability efforts in [CITY]?”

Also, there's a lot more help in the Quests of the iMatterNow campaign on connecting with a city official and gathering the necessary data.

With a simple but science-based report card, you can hold your cities accountable for truly protecting your future. And just as you have do well to get good grades in school, the iMatter Climate Report Card requires that a city and its political leaders have real, measurable plans and take meaningful actions.

The Report Card also gives tangible actions that your cities can take together to improve grades  and address the climate crisis.

The Report Card was designed to evaluate a city or town’s progress and plans in doing their part to end the climate crisis. One of the main grades is related to a Climate Action Plan. As creating a Climate Action Plan can take a good amount of work, you may find that smaller cities participate in a county’s plan instead of creating one of their own. If this is the case, you should use the county plan to respond to the Climate Action Plan section of the report card.

It also could be possible to use the Report Card at a state level, but some modifications would be necessary.

If you have questions, please send us an email and ask for help. 

Click here for detailed background on the iMatter Report Card (and to see a sample)

Most cities are using the term “Climate Action Plan.” Sometimes you may see it called Climate Change Action Plan. You may also see Climate Recovery Plan, Sustainability Plan, or Climate Recovery Ordinance. If you see ordinance, that’s generally a good thing, because it means your city has enacted a climate plan into law. It’s also possible you could see a plan called an Emissions Reduction Plan.

(Note: You are looking for a community-wide Climate Action Plan. Some cities also have Climate Action Plans for city operations – just the activities and buildings run by the city, not the community as a whole. Make sure to be aware of this as you search for your city’s community-wide Climate Action Plan.)

A Climate Action Plan typically starts with understanding how much greenhouse gas emissions are created by a community. In order to reduce something, you have to know how much of it you create! Figuring out how much greenhouse gases are created is called a Greenhouse Gas Inventory (you may also see it referred to as a greenhouse gas baseline). As it’s the first step in creating a Climate Action Plan, the Report Card gives some credit for cities that have done a greenhouse gas inventory.

A greenhouse gas inventory should include at least the activities that directly produce greenhouse gas emissions in the community and the community’s direct consumption of energy.  Here are the activities generally included in a community inventory:

1. Electricity generated in the community
2. Electricity used by the community
3. Transportation fuel used in the community
4. Natural Gas (and/or other fossil fuels used to heat homes) used by the community

Sometimes Greenhouse Gas Inventories and Climate Action Plans also include information about emissions caused in other places from the goods and services used in a city. By purchasing goods and services, a community’s citizens contribute to emissions around the world, in the places where those goods or services are produced. If your city is addressing these emissions, they’ll get “extra credit” in one of the next questions.

Click here for detailed information on where to look for a city's Climate Action Plan

What if there is no Climate Action Plan or Greenhouse Gas Inventory that has been done in a city?

If they haven’t been done, then the grade is an F.

What if the city government is planning on doing them?

It’s great if the city is planning on doing them! It is on the way to a better grade. In fact, if a Greenhouse Gas Inventory is planned and will be completed within the next 6 months (make sure there is a real commitment date!), then the city gets some credit and the grade rises to at least a D-.  

Then, when a Climate Action Plan is completed the grade will increase again.

The baseline is the starting point. Ideally we want cities to get to zero, then the starting point really doesn’t matter. Cities can make it easier on themselves to get to an 80% reduction by picking a starting year with a higher emissions level. So, we’d suggest you ask tough questions if your city is picking a year that makes it easier, but in general we’re not going to worry about which year is picked.

Generally, you’ll find annual progress reports in the same place as Climate Action Plans. We recommend doing the same kind of searches as suggested here.

Additionally, you may need to call your city government. Look for an Environment or Environmental Services department. You may even find someone with “Climate Change” or “Energy Analyst” or “Sustainability” in their title. It’s also generally quite easy to call a general number and ask for someone that deals with environment or climate change issues.

Generally yes, but they will often not be as detailed as the Climate Action Plan. 

Detailed quantified results typically would require the completion of another Greenhouse Gas Inventory. Completing a Greenhouse Gas Inventory is time consuming and can require quite a bit of work. An Inventory forms the foundation of a Climate Action Plan, which is a set of planned actions intended to reduce a city’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Generally a complete Inventory is only done once every 3 to 5 years, and it is unrealistic to expect it to be done more frequently. However, cities should be regularly reporting on their Climate Action Plans, and the measures they are putting in place to reduce greenhouse gases.

Here is an example, from Eugene, Oregon of a 2013 Climate Progress Report on their 2010 Climate Action Plan.

A Climate Recovery Ordinance is basically a Climate Action Plan that has been made into a law. Eugene, Oregon is an example of a place where this has happened.

Here is the press release from our partner Our Children’s Trust on the ordinance.

Here is the ordinance itself.

Renewable energy is generally defined as energy that comes from resources that are naturally replenished on a human timescale* such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, waves and geothermal heat. For the Report Card, we use the US Energy Information Administration’s (US EIA) classification system for defining what is renewable energy. They include the following in their renewable energy figures:

• Hydroelectric Power
• Geothermal
• Solar
• Wind
• Biomass (includes biofuels, wood, waste)

For the United States, the source of national data also comes from the US EIA. For Canada it comes from the International Energy Agency. Note that 2016 Canada data is an extrapolation from prior years.

* - Note that on very long timescales (millions and millions of years, fossil fuels are technically replenishable. But not in any way that is useful to humanity.

Click here for help finding city data. If you can't find city data then you'll use state data, also available here.

(Note - we don't have Province information for Canada. If you are having trouble, send an email to ReportCard@imatteryouth.org.)

Waste is used as an indicator for the amount of things we buy that cause greenhouse gases.  This is often referred to as “Materials” or “Materials and Waste.”  Reduction of waste has three main impacts on greenhouse gases.

1. Reduced amounts of waste in a landfill, especially food waste, reduce the amount of greenhouse gases (methane) given off by the landfill (according to the EPA, waste in landfills generates 2% of our greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.).
2. The production and transport of the food and products (materials) we buy is estimated to cause 42% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (see “Background note on greenhouse gas emissions” below).  Less overall waste created likely would mean we are buying less stuff that causes greenhouse gases when it is produced and delivered to the market.
3. More recycling typically reduces greenhouse gases, because it generally requires a lot less greenhouse gases to recycle materials than to create new materials.  The EPA has estimated that moving to 100% recycling would result in a decrease in our national greenhouse gas emissions of 6%.

Background information from the EPA

“Waste generation” is the sum of materials disposed (in landfills and incinerators) and recovered (via recycling, composting, and some forms of energy recovery).  In 2012, Americans generated about 251 million tons of trash and recycled and composted almost 87 million tons of this material, equivalent to a 34.5 percent recycling rate. On average, Americans recycled and composted 1.51 pounds out of our individual waste generation rate of 4.38 pounds per person per day.  

Note that EPA statistics do not include most construction and demolition materials and cannot be readily compared to data from local communities that include these waste types.

Click here to learn how to find waste data for your city.

Click here to learn how to find population data for your city.

Most programs that would qualify as removing carbon from the atmosphere probably aren’t labeled as carbon removal programs. You need to look for programs on your city government’s website that do one of the following:

• Encourage tree planting
• Manage forests or the number of trees in a city
• Increase the amount of green space in a city (green spaces are areas of grass, trees, or other vegetation set apart for recreational or aesthetic purposes in an urban environment.)
• Protect or restore wetlands
• Protect or restore grasslands or prairies
• While you’re less likely to find this, in a community with farmland, there are ways of encouraging carbon storage in the soil with certain farming and livestock management practices.

You may need to make a phone call to your city government to find out if there is such a program. Look for a Department with Environment in its name or a person with Environment in their title.

More info on carbon and soil

Plants and grasses also store carbon and then also transfer some into the soil.  When plants and grasses die and decompose, some of their carbon is released back into the atmosphere, but some of it transfers into the soil.  There are ways of managing soil to encourage more of this transfer to happen.  More carbon in the soil is not only good for removing greenhouse gases, but it also makes for healthier soil that can support more plants and wildlife or in the case of croplands, produce more and healthier food.

Programs you find may remove carbon or carbon dioxide from the atmosphere even though they don’t actually have that as a goal. For example, a program with metrics tracking an increase in the number of trees, or of wetlands, would be removing carbon from the atmosphere even if that wasn’t the program’s main objective.

To find if the program actually tracks the amount of carbon removed, you should be able to find somewhere in reports about program results, a linkage to carbon or carbon dioxide removed (you may also see the word “sequestered” instead of removed). This is typically reported in pounds or tons of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere.

For example, an average gasoline powered car in the U.S. emits between 4 and 5 tons of carbon dioxide each year. According to the American Forests organization, the typical tree they plant removes 910 pounds of carbon dioxide. This means that every 9-10 trees added to a forest, removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere equivalent to what a car adds during a year of driving.

The four sections will be combined into an overall grade, and then, if applicable, a half-grade increase from youth involvement is applied. Weightings are based on the U.S averages for the impact of each area on a typical community’s greenhouse gas footprint.

The “Carbon Removal” grade is slightly underweighted compared to an overall U.S impact, but this is because much of the U.S. impact will likely come from areas that may be outside typical city boundaries (e.g., national forests, croplands, etc.)

 

Sample grades with weightings

	Grade	Weighting
Zero Emissions Climate Action Plan	C	50%
Renewable Energy %	B	20%
Waste (Generated/Recycled/Composted)	B	20%
Carbon Removal	D	10%
Overall grade	C+

Click here to get detailed information about individual grades