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Climate Change The Harvard University

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Introduction
In behalf of its commitment to mitigate climate change the Harvard University is fostering its schools, employees and students to reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions. “As an initial step in pursuit of its long term goal, Harvard committed to an immediate goal of reducing its net GHG emissions resulting from existing operations and future growth by 30% relative to its 2006 baseline by 2016” (“Greenhouse Gas Reduction Goal,” 2013). The Green Harvard Initiative, together with the Harvard’s Office of Sustainability and the Environmental Health & Safety Department have taken the lead to promote and implement initiatives related to GHG emissions reduction.
According to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) framework, such …show more content…

Due to its size, some Harvard facilities also need to comply with different regulatory reporting requirements, such as the Massachusetts GHG Reporting regulation for facilities emitting more than 5,000 MTCDE (Macrae, 2016). Again, data scrutiny and data management are essential to present cohesion on those diverse reports.
Last but not least, besides data quality and quantity availability, many variables may still hinder the ability to evaluate the effectiveness of energy conservation measures (ECMs).
The objective of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of specific ECMs deployed in Harvard’s buildings based on the data provided by the university.
Definition of Boundary
The ECM projects means to benefit the Harvard goal of 30% reduction in absolute emissions in 2016 according to the 2006 GHG emissions baseline (“Our plan”, 2014). The Harvard’s Office of Sustainability and the Environmental Health & Safety Department have selected 15 projects to be further analyzed by this study. These projects were pre-selected based on the best quality of the data available.
Most of the selected projects were based on electricity related savings involving light/lamps technology improvement and/or occupancy sensors implementation. Other projects were related to compressors and refrigerators improvement. However, on a first evaluation, it was concluded that most of the projects could not be considered for evaluation of effectiveness due to the lack of data

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