Anthony Hickling has experience in environmental and social sustainability as well as nonprofit management and fundraising. His foundations in sustainable building are informed by experience at Presidio Graduate School where he received an MBA in Sustainable Solutions, as well as his work on the sustainability team at Webcor Builders in San Francisco. Through academic and professional experience he has learned to navigate the priorities of traditional business stakeholders while incorporating social and environmental externalities. From executing successful marketing plans to determining research priorities, Anthony believes that wide impact considerations and diversity of thought should be embedded into all decision-making.

Anthony’s Joins the Carbon Accounting and Management Podcast to Discuss:

• What embodied carbon is and why is it important
• The role of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) in making informed material choices.
• The EC3 (embodied carbon and construction calculator) tool: what it does and how it can be utilized
• The need for collaboration among building owners, developers, engineers, architects, and contractors

Anthyony’s Listener Takeaway: If there's only one thing that our guests take away from this conversation, what do you think it should be?

Talk about embodied carbon. Everybody has a different role to play, if you're a public company or a small company, or if you're a contractor or an architect, this has an impact on many different levels of your total carbon emissions within the scope that you control. It's really important that everybody is both aware of this impact, but then also asking for decision makers to be playing a role in reducing embodied carbon. So talk about it. Ask for environmental product declarations. Ask your designers what their plans are to incorporate embodied carbon reductions in their designs. I think that right now, that's really what we need to make sure that this is scaling as a regular approach to how we design and build.

Timestamps:

03:56 Neglected carbon impacts in the built environment.

08:51 Including carbon in building design decisions.

10:10 Tools to help reduce building design's environmental impact.

16:41 Contributing to reducing embodied carbon impact.

17:44 Prioritizing reducing embodied carbon in projects.

22:49 California's policies reducing embodied carbon emissions.

24:10 California requiring construction emissions reductions for large projects.

28:55 Requesting data to encourage suppliers to prioritize accessibility.

34:23 Addressing embodied carbon reduction collaboratively.

Dr. Gillenwater is a co-founder, Executive Director, and Dean of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute, a non-profit organization with the unique mission to train and professionalize a global community of experts for measuring, verifying, and managing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Michael is a thought leader on GHG measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV), carbon offsets, additionality, green power, international capacity building, and environmental accounting. He has dedicated his career to professional and international development, focusing on the infrastructure needed to produce highly credible environmental information that can serve as the basis of effective climate policies. Beyond guiding the Institute’s strategy and programming, Michael also directs its research program and curriculum development.

He is a four time lead author for the IPCC and contributor to its 2007 Nobel Peace Price. He has been actively engaged in the work of the UNFCCC process for 25 years, including the training of compliance experts for the Kyoto Protocol. He has been a core advisor and contributing author to the WRI/WBCSD GHG Protocol. At the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Michael was lead author of the official U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory for its first 7 years. He also served on the U.S. negotiating team to the UNFCCC Conference of Parties.

Michael founded and serves as a co-Editor in Chief for the peer reviewed journal Carbon Management published by Tyler & Francis. He is also an active research scholar on GHG accounting and climate policy topics, having been widely published in peer-reviewed journals and quoted by the media. Dr. Gillenwater completed his PhD at the Science, Technology, & Environmental Policy Program at Princeton University, where his research was on the economics of renewable energy and emission markets and design of environmental commodities. He has three master’s degrees: i) environmental engineering, ii) technology policy, both from MIT, and iii) evolutionary systems from the University of Sussex where he was a Fulbright scholar. His bachelors is in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M University.

Michael Joins the Carbon Accounting and Management Podcast to Discuss:

• Recommendations for defining boundaries
• Best practices for disclosures without impacting competitive advantages
• Advice for showing consistency over time when more accurate methods of collecting data appear

Michael’s Listener Takeaway: If there's only one thing that our guests take away from this conversation, what do you think it should be?

Don't assume how we think about and how we do corporate GHG reporting now is the way it should be or will continue to be like. Especially going into the next couple years, open your mind to potential new ways of approaching this question. Start asking yourself and others: why are we doing this, what are specific use cases? Dive deeper into the specific use cases, not just for the inventory data now, but what you can imagine you might want to use the data for in the future. Start the thought process of being open to new ways of thinking.Maybe there isn't one corporate inventory. Maybe there's different ways of reporting for different purposes.

Learn more about the work being done at the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute at ghgmi.org.

Timstamps:

04:02 Scope three emissions reporting challenges.

10:58 Ensuring credibility requirces more than ransparency and auditing.

18:35 IPCC guidelines for detailed inventory issue guidance.

26:30 Listener takeaway and closing questions.

Dr. Gillenwater is a co-founder, Executive Director, and Dean of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute, a non-profit organization with the unique mission to train and professionalize a global community of experts for measuring, verifying, and managing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Michael is a thought leader on GHG measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV), carbon offsets, additionality, green power, international capacity building, and environmental accounting. He has dedicated his career to professional and international development, focusing on the infrastructure needed to produce highly credible environmental information that can serve as the basis of effective climate policies. Beyond guiding the Institute’s strategy and programming, Michael also directs its research program and curriculum development.

He is a four time lead author for the IPCC and contributor to its 2007 Nobel Peace Price. He has been actively engaged in the work of the UNFCCC process for 25 years, including the training of compliance experts for the Kyoto Protocol. He has been a core advisor and contributing author to the WRI/WBCSD GHG Protocol. At the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Michael was lead author of the official U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory for its first 7 years. He also served on the U.S. negotiating team to the UNFCCC Conference of Parties.

Michael founded and serves as a co-Editor in Chief for the peer reviewed journal Carbon Management published by Tyler & Francis. He is also an active research scholar on GHG accounting and climate policy topics, having been widely published in peer-reviewed journals and quoted by the media. Dr. Gillenwater completed his PhD at the Science, Technology, & Environmental Policy Program at Princeton University, where his research was on the economics of renewable energy and emission markets and design of environmental commodities. He has three master’s degrees: i) environmental engineering, ii) technology policy, both from MIT, and iii) evolutionary systems from the University of Sussex where he was a Fulbright scholar. His bachelors is in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M University.

Michael Joins the Carbon Accounting and Management Podcast to Discuss:

• How to determine who would be the best fit within an organization to conduct an GHG inventory
• Spend based emission factors and where to find reputable sources
• TACCC Principals for GHG inventories

Michael’s Listener Takeaway: If there's only one thing that our guests take away from this conversation, what do you think it should be?

Don't assume how we think about and how we do corporate GHG reporting now is the way it should be or will continue to be like. Especially going into the next couple years, open your mind to potential new ways of approaching this question. Start asking yourself and others: why are we doing this, what are specific use cases? Dive deeper into the specific use cases, not just for the inventory data now, but what you can imagine you might want to use the data for in the future. Start the thought process of being open to new ways of thinking.Maybe there isn't one corporate inventory. Maybe there's different ways of reporting for different purposes.

Learn more about the work being done at the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute at ghgmi.org.

Timestamps:

08:50 Engineering skills for understanding environmental systems processes.

12:48 Reliance on default factors limiting accurate emissions tracking.

16:12 Expansive lifecycle assessments offering emission source insights.

19:42 GHC protocol website for resource options.

23:07 Importance of transparency for environmental treaty compliance.

25:32 Corporate reporting not designed for company comparisons.