Climate Terms and Tools
Facilities face many challenges related to climate change, including reducing emissions, adapting to new conditions, and increasing resilience. This page serves as a primer for building personnel who are new to the topic or looking for additional resources.
Terminology
Understanding climate change's unique vocabulary is the first step. The definitions below have been compiled by federal experts in the field.
| Key Concepts | |
|---|---|
| Climate | Climate is a description of an area's average weather conditions and the extent to which those conditions vary over long time intervals, generally decades or centuries. |
| Weather | The meteorological conditions at a specific location in an immediate or near-term time horizon (hours, days, or a week). Rain, snow, wind, hurricanes, and tornadoes can be considered weather events. |
| Climate Change | The long-term change in average and expected weather patterns, and particularly the warming of the planet. Some examples of the impacts of warming temperatures are rising sea levels, ice melt and shifts in plant blooming times. |
| Climate Literacy | The understanding of an individual’s and organization’s influence on climate and climate’s influence on an organization and society. It supports individuals and organizations in making informed decisions, plan approaches, and implement solutions to climate adaptation or mitigation. |
| Climate Mitigation | Activities, investments, and projects intended to reduce the GHG emissions and ultimate impacts of human activity on the planet’s atmosphere, physical processes, and biosphere. Synonymous with GHG reduction. Decarbonization is a strategy that is part of broader climate mitigation efforts. |
| Greenhouse Gas (GHG) | Gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. These include: Carbon dioxide (CO2); Methane (CH4); Nitrous Oxide (N2O); Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs); Perfluorocarbons (PFCs); Sulphur Hexafluoride (SF6) and Nitrogen Trifluoride (NF3). |
| Climate Adaptation | Actions that address the adjustment in natural or human systems in anticipation of or response to a changing environment in a way that effectively uses beneficial opportunities or reduces negative effects. Some examples include hardening infrastructure (e.g., building sea walls and raising roads), utilizing the natural environment to protect assets and people (e.g., expanding coastal wetlands to absorb the impacts of sea level rise), building preparedness (e.g., ensuring supply chains will endure the changes), and capitalizing on new opportunities (e.g., sales of sustainable and resilient goods and services). |
| Climate Hazards | Hazards that can include (but are not limited to) extreme temperatures, drought, heavy rainfall, flooding, wildfires, coastal storms, etc. |
| Climate Risk | Refers to the potential negative impacts of climate change on an organization. This can include physical risks, which can be acute (e.g., extreme weather events like hurricanes, fires, and floods) or chronic (e.g., long-term changes and variability in precipitation, temperature, or sea-level). |
| Supply Chain Climate Risk | Expected climate or weather-related risks (e.g., extreme heat waves, tropical storms and hurricanes, wildfires, etc.) that can significantly impact the availability, cost, speed, responsiveness, and quality of a product or service’s manufacture, processing and distribution. |
| Climate-Related Financial Risk | Risks from climate change that could impact the financial stability of an organization and/or the greater financial system and economy. This includes risk related to the physical impacts of climate change and the transition to a low-carbon economy. |
| Resilience | The capacity and ability to anticipate, prepare for, and adapt to changing conditions and withstand, respond to, and recover rapidly from disruptions. |
| Embodied Carbon | Embodied Carbon refers to the GHGs generated by the manufacturing, transportation, installation, maintenance, and disposal of construction materials used in buildings, roads, and other infrastructure.1 |
| Operational Carbon | Operational Carbon refers to the GHG emissions associated with energy used to operate a building.1 |
| Scope 1 Emissions | Direct GHG emissions that occur from sources that are owned or controlled by an organization (e.g., emissions associated with fuel combustion in boilers, furnaces, vehicles).2 For more information, see SFTool's Greenhouse Gas Accounting page. |
| Scope 2 Emissions | Indirect GHG emissions associated with the purchase of electricity, steam, heat, or cooling.2 For more information, see SFTool's Greenhouse Gas Accounting page. |
| Scope 3 Emissions | Indirect GHG emissions that are the result of activities from assets not owned or controlled by the reporting organization, and are not included in Scope 2, that the organization indirectly affects in its value chain.3 For more information, see SFTool's Greenhouse Gas Accounting page. |
| Net Zero | Means consuming only as much energy as is produced, achieving a sustainable balance between water availability and demand, and eliminating solid waste sent to landfills.4 |
| Net Zero Energy | In the context of buildings and facilities, net zero energy means maximizing energy efficiency, implementing energy recovery opportunities where feasible, and balancing the actual annual source energy consumption with on-site renewable energy generation.5 |
| Carbon Neutrality | Refers to the idea of achieving net zero GHG emissions by balancing those emissions so they are equal (or less than) the emissions that get removed through the planet’s natural absorption.6 |
| Strategies | |
|---|---|
| Decarbonization | Decarbonization is the process of reducing the amount of GHG emissions from design, construction activities, and building operations. In buildings, decarbonization and GHG mitigation actions include: energy efficiency, fuel switching, demand response, demand flexibility, renewables deployment/purchase, and refrigerant leaks prevention (e.g., HFC fugitive emissions). It also includes awareness of the embodied carbon of materials and exploring opportunities to sequester carbon through natural means in the soil and trees. |
| Grid-interactive Efficient Building (GEB) | GEB is an energy efficient building with smart technologies characterized by the active use of distributed energy resources (DERs) to optimize energy use for grid services, occupant needs and preferences, and cost reductions in a continuous and integrated way. GEB builds on the well-established discipline of energy efficiency by adding strategies and technologies to also manage peak demand and coordinate buildings’ electrical loads, taking into account peak usage hours, renewable generation, storage options, and resiliency needs as appropriate. |
| Renewable Energy | As defined in 42 U.S.C. § 15852(b) , renewable energy is electric energy generated from solar, wind, biomass, landfill gas, ocean (including tidal, wave, current, and thermal), geothermal, municipal solid waste, or new hydroelectric generation capacity achieved from increased efficiency or additions of new capacity at an existing hydroelectric project. For hydroelectric, "new" means placed in service after Jan. 1, 1999, consistent with the definition of new hydroelectric generation capacity in section 2852 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007 as amended by section 2842 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 (10 U.S.C. § 2911(e)). |
| Whole Building Life Cycle Assessment (WBLCA) | An assessment of environmental impacts (for example, GHG emissions) across all stages of the construction, operation and maintenance, and disposal of a building. For more information, see SFTool's Life Cycle Assessment and Buildings page. |
| Circular Economy | A circular economy reduces material use, redesigns materials, products, and services to be less resource intensive, and recaptures “waste” as a resource to manufacture new materials and products.7 |
| Carbon Pollution-free Electricity | As defined in Sec. 603(d) of Executive Order 14057, Catalyzing Clean Energy Industries and Jobs Through Federal Sustainability, carbon pollution-free electricity, or CFE, means electrical energy produced from resources that generate no carbon emissions, including marine energy, solar, wind, hydrokinetic (including tidal, wave, current, and thermal), geothermal, hydroelectric, nuclear, renewably sourced hydrogen, and electrical energy generation from fossil resources to the extent there is active capture and storage of carbon dioxide emissions that meets EPA requirements. |
| Tools | |
|---|---|
| ESPC | Energy Savings Performance Contract - Authorized by the Energy Policy Act of 1992, these contracts are a partnership between an agency and an energy services company that allow federal agencies to procure energy savings and facility improvements with little to no up-front capital costs or special appropriations from Congress. Energy services company improvements are paid over a contractual term as a share of the energy or water cost savings realized. |
| UESC | Utility Energy Service Contract - Authorized by the Energy Policy Act of 1992, these contracts are a partnership between an agency and a utility that allows federal agencies to procure energy savings and facility improvements with little to no up-front capital costs or special appropriations from Congress. The utility is paid over a contractual term as a share of the energy or water cost savings realized. |
| NDER | National Deep Energy Retrofit - A GSA program using ESPCs to achieve significant energy reductions, with a goal of over 50%; it has doubled the average energy reduction for GSA compared to the government-wide average. |
Resources
For further information, see the following federal government resources:
- NOAA Climate.gov | What is Climate Science Literacy?
- GlobalChange.gov | Videos and Webinars
- YouTube USGCRP | Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in a Changing Climate: An Overview of NCA4
- GlobalChange.gov | Fifth National Climate Assessment
- FEMP Energy.gov | Process for Procuring a Federal Utility Energy Service Contract
- FEMP Energy.gov | Utility Program and Utility Energy Service Contracts for Federal Agencies
- Sustainability.gov | GSA Climate Change Risk Management Plan
For information on federal government GHG emissions, see the Department of Energy's Federal Facility Reporting Requirements and Performance Data and these datasets from the Comprehensive Annual Energy Data and Sustainability Performance report:
1. Carbon Leadership Forum | The Embodied Carbon Challenge
2. US EPA | Scope 1 and Scope 2 Inventory Guidance3. US EPA | Scope 3 Inventory Guidance4. US EPA | Net Zero Resources5. Department of Energy | Federal New Buildings Handbook for Net Zero Energy, Water, and Waste6. UNFCCC | A Beginner’s Guide to Climate Neutrality7. US EPA | What is a Circular Economy?
Related Topics
Climate Change
Changes in average weather conditions that persist over multiple decades or longer. Climate change encompasses both increases and decreases in temperature, as well as shifts in precipitation, changing risk of certain types of severe weather events, and changes to other features of the climate system.
Source: GlobalChange.gov | Climate and Health Assessment, A5 Glossary and Acronyms
Learn more: Climate Terms and Tools