Cost Benefit Analysis for the Indiana Resilience Cohort
Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute (ERI) manages a program called the Resilience Cohort, which leads Indiana’s city, town, and county governments through the process of measuring, managing, and tracking their greenhouse gas emissions. Participants join a cohort of peers and each jurisdiction receives one-on-one guidance, attends cohort training webinars, gains the opportunity to apply for additional staff capacity by hosting a summer intern, and more.
Participating communities would like to complete a cost-benefit analysis for the greenhouse gas reduction initiatives in their plan before the final version is presented to the mayor and/or city council for adoption. Given that there are many cities working on similar plans with the same initiatives at the same time, ERI wishes to provide them with a series of cost-benefit-analysis worksheets that would vary by initiative. For example, one common initiative in a climate action plan is to require that all new city facilities be LEED Certified (or greater). The calculation and inputs for this analysis would be the same (e.g., number of buildings, level of LEED certification, average energy bills, anticipated savings), but the numbers filled in for each input would vary, creating different results for each city.