Greenprint Creates Index to Measure Carbon Emissions, Efficiency

NEW YORK CITY-The Greenprint Foundation’s Global Cities Index, which aims to provide global cities with a way to measure carbon emissions and energy efficiency in their office markets, has been accepted as a Clinton Global Initiative. The move comes out of the CGI’s annual meeting, where similar green building initiatives emerged this week, as GlobeSt.com reported.

“What Greenprint has done is to put together a commitment to develop--along with its members and hopefully a series of partners--a performance index along the lines of the Greenprint Carbon Index that we’ll do on a global basis,” Charles Leitner, president and CEO of the Greenprint Foundation, tells GlobeSt.com.

Targeted cities, he says, will include New York, Los Angeles and other locations where “the leadership is in place in terms of the major landlords and the political and government side of the equation,” Leitner says.

The foundation will work to create public/private partnership activity, “or we can interface with what the local governments are doing in terms of regulation,” Leitner says. The data compiled from these efforts would then “be put into a useful tool that people can use to establish performance standards.”

An initial index report is expected to be released in July 2012, though data is already being collected through a partnership with the city of London, where a program is currently underway.

In global cities like New York, with an office tenancy that values energy efficiency, Leitner thinks the program can gain traction.

“I think it’s a combination of the tenants and the way that office buildings are structured economically,” he says of the potential interest of New York building owners and tenants in the index. “The lease structure tends to give the landlord a significant amount of responsibility for energy costs and energy consumption, though not all of it.”