Daly City's Green Vision - City of Daly City

Appendix A:
The Local Government
Operations Protocol
This inventory follows the standard outlined in the Local Government Operations Protocol, which was adopted in
2008 by the California Air Resources Board (ARB) and serves as the national standard for quantifying and reporting
greenhouse emissions from local government operations. This and the other inventories conducted for the Silicon
Valley Climate Protection partnership are the first to follow LGOP, representing a strong step toward standardizing
how inventories are conducted and reported.
A.1 Local Government Operations Protocol
A.1.1 Background
In 2008, ICLEI, ARB, and the California Climate Action Registry (CCAR) released LGOP to serve as a U.S.
supplement to the International Emissions Analysis Protocol. The purpose of LGOP is to provide the principles,
approach, methodology, and procedures needed to develop a local government operations greenhouse gas emissions
inventory. It leads participants through the process of accurately quantifying and reporting emissions, including
providing calculation methodologies and reporting guidance. LGOP guidance is divided into three main parts:
identifying emissions to be included in the inventory, quantifying emissions using best available estimation
methods, and reporting emissions.
The overarching goal of LGOP is to allow local governments to develop emissions inventories using standards that
are consistent, comparable, transparent, and recognized nationally, ultimately enabling the measurement of
emissions over time. LGOP adopted five overarching accounting and reporting principles toward this end:
relevance, completeness, consistency, transparency and accuracy. Methodologies that did not adhere to these
principles were either left out of LGOP or included as Scope 3 emissions. LGOP was created solely to standardize
how emissions inventories are conducted and reported; as such it represents a currently accepted standard for
inventorying emissions but does not contain any legislative or program-specific requirements. Mandates by the
State of California or any other legislative body, while possibly using LGOP as a standard, do not currently exist,
and California local governments are not currently required to inventory their emissions. Program-specific
2005 Daly City Government Operations Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory I