Daly City's Green Vision - City of Daly City

While this report uses a standard roll-up number, these numbers should be used with caution, as they can be
problematic for three reasons:
First, a roll-up number does not represent all emissions from Daly City’s operations, only a summation of
inventoried emissions using available estimation methods. Reporting a roll-up number can be misleading and
encourage citizens, staff, and policymakers to think of this number as the local government’s “total” emissions.
Therefore, when communicating a roll-up number it is important to represent it only as a sum of inventoried
emissions, not as a comprehensive total.
Second, rolling up emissions may not simply involve adding emissions from all sectors, as emissions from different
scopes can be double-counted when they are reported as one number. For example, if a local government operates a
municipal utility that provides electricity to government facilities, these are emissions from both the power
generation and facilities sectors. If these sectors are rolled up into a single number, these emissions are double
counted, or reported twice. For these reasons, it is important to be cautious when creating a roll-up number to avoid
double counting; the roll-up number used in this report was created specifically to avoid any possible double
counting.
Third, local governments often wish to compare their emissions to those of other local governments. But it is very
difficult to use a roll-up number as a common measure between local governments, for a number of reasons. First,
as of now there is no national or international standard for reporting emissions as a single roll-up number. In
addition, local governments provide different services to their citizens, and the scale of the services (and thus the
emissions) is highly dependent upon the size of the jurisdiction. For these reasons, comparisons between local
government roll-up numbers should not be made without significant analysis of the basis of the roll-up number and
the services provided by the local governments being compared.
2005 Daly City Government Operations Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory 13