Preparing corporate and community GHG inventories to inform community climate planning.
Clients: City of Kingston, Mississippi Mills, Lanark County, King Township, Smiths Falls, Perth
Location: Ontario
Overview
Greenscale develops corporate and community greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories for municipalities across Ontario, providing the analytical foundation needed for community and corporate climate action planning, CDP reporting, and federal funding applications. Our work extends across municipalities of varying size and capacity, including th City of Kingston, Mississippi Mills, King Township, Lanark County, Smiths Falls, and the Town of Perth. Each inventory requires a structured approach to data collection, boundary definition, and methodological transparency so that municipalities can maintain consistent baselines over time.
For each municipality, Greenscale reviews and applies current emissions-estimation methods, evaluates baseline methodologies, and ensures alignment with Partners for Climate Protection (PCP) milestones where applicable. This includes integrating utility data, fleet and facility information, transportation activity estimates, waste and wastewater emissions approaches, agriculture, and forests. Our inventories are designed so that staff can update them annually without revising the underlying structure, enabling clear year-over-year comparisons and evidence-based planning. Greenscale’s approach also helps to reduce year-over-year costs.
Greenscale has supported the City of Kingston with its corporate and community inventories every year since 2019. This work includes preparing the full methodological and data documentation required for CDP reporting, an international disclosure platform where municipalities submit information on emissions, climate risks, and mitigation efforts. When Greenscale began assisting, Kingston held a C+ score. After two years of strengthened explanations of methods, clearer boundary definitions, and improved documentation of emissions sources, the City’s score increased to A-, reflecting the consistency and clarity of the inventories submitted. This collaboration continues each year as new approaches and emission factors emerge.
The approach used for Kingston is applied across all municipal clients: inventories are structured to support grant programs such as those offered through the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), including initiatives that require validated baselines and clearly defined emissions scopes. Greenscale’s inventory work also informs broader climate-planning activities, where the results feed into sector reviews, pathway modeling, and program design, helping communities make informed decisions about future planning.
Inventory development also supports funding readiness by providing the defensible baselines required for multi-stage planning processes. Greenscale’s work with Lanark County illustrates this connection, where inventories informed emissions-reduction targets, methodological review, and integration into a climate-resiliency funding framework.
Across all municipalities, inventory results provide councils and staff with a stable basis for understanding where emissions originate, how sectors change over time, and which areas require future attention. The work positions municipalities to meet reporting commitments, evaluate climate-action opportunities, and pursue external funding with confidence in their underlying data.
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