Tag: evaluación

Last July 19th, version 3.0 of the Energy Performance and Carbon Emissions Assessment and Monitoring Tool (ECAM) was launched.

ECAM 3.0, like its previous versions, is a free, open-source tool available on the WaCCliM website. Businesses providing water and treatment services around the world can use ECAM 3.0 to benchmark their energy use and greenhouse gas emissions system wide. The tool identifies opportunities to reduce emissions and costs and allows utilities to monitor and report on their results.

By identifying areas where greenhouse gas emissions can be cut, increasing energy savings, and improving general efficiency, ECAM offers a holistic approach so that urban water utilities shift to climate-smart water management. It also prepares water and treatment businesses for future climate-mitigation reporting needs.

It is not necessary for water and treatment companies to collect special data, nor do they have to create an account to use ECAM. The tool functions with the operational data that administrators and operators use every day. If some data is unavailable, ECAM provides complementary assumptions based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) models.

It is important for water and treatment companies to take measures to mitigate their emissions since it is estimated that the water sector contributes around 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

ECAM will serve as an analytical tool tackling this challenge. It will make it possible to evaluate energy performance and carbon emissions throughout the urban water cycle, from extraction and distribution to wastewater treatment and sludge management, adapting to each company’s analysis capabilities.

The ECAM tool update represents another step towards a smart and sustainable urban water system with lower emissions and reduced vulnerability to local climate change impacts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More information:

When implementing climate measures, indicators play a critical role in monitoring and evaluation (M&E) mechanisms. In addition to promoting transparency, they justify investments in climate change adaptation projects as effective and sustainable actions.

In Mexico, the General Law on Climate Change (LGCC) recognizes in Article 27 that the national policy of adaptation to climate change “will be based on instruments of diagnosis, planning, measurement, monitoring, reporting, verification, and evaluation”, with the aim of reducing the vulnerability of society and ecosystems, as well as strengthening the resilience of natural and human systems to the effects of climate change. This provision is essential to glimpse the progress that Mexico has made in complying with Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) on adaptation.

The monitoring and evaluation (M&E) instruments, as well as facilitating the monitoring of project progress, function as a transparency and accountability mechanism that is attractive for both political and financial decision makers. Thus, managers of climate change adaptation projects must design M&E mechanisms with indicators that provide unequivocal conclusions about how adaptation measures reduce vulnerabilities to the consequences of climate change.

The formulation of indicators for monitoring and verifying the results of adaptation projects presents challenges, amongst them the uncertainties about the local and regional consequences of climate change, the time horizon of climate variability, and the relationship between climate change and other social aspects. Likewise, given the diversity of socio-cultural, socio-political and geographic contexts, there is no universal indicator or list of indicators that can evaluate the results of adaptation or promote their replicability.