The University of Maine at Farmington takes climate change very seriously and is committed to lessening it's contribution of greenhouse gases into earth's atmosphere. In order to make the most efficient changes we need to better understand where are emissions are coming from.

     Clean Air- Cool Planet is an organization dedicated to finding and promoting solutions to global warming. They have designed a free program to help schools and other institutions conduct greenhouse gas audits.

     The program calculates emissions from 1990 to present in these categories: purchased electricity, on-campus stationary sources (oil, propane, coal etc.), the university fleet, commuter transportation, agriculture (fertilizer application), solid waste, and refrigeration and other chemical use. The program takes annual data from gallons of distillate oil, kWh of electricity, and short tons of solid waste (in a landfill with no CH₄ recovery) and converts it into equivalent greenhouse gases. This allows us to see which areas of operation on campus are contributing the greatest to climate change, and which areas should be our focus.

     Sylvie Boisvert and Rachel Thompson began the audit for UMF in spring of 2005. Since then Laura Lalemand, Doug Rawlings (Director of Institutional Research), and Bob Lawrence, Leo Deon and others from UMF's facilities management department have continued the work. The audit requires time and research, and is a work in progress.

     To learn more about the program, visit Clean air- Cool Planet's website: http://www.cleanair-coolplanet.org/

     Preview the areas of audit that we have completed on this excel document: UMF's GHG Audit Info 3/06

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