Tool: enersis gaia Platform

gaia CO₂balance is an online map-based platform developed by enersis providing data on annual emissions and emissions change to over 1800 cities in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

Specifications

Suitable for which city climate journey stage?	Establishing an emissions baseline 2 scope Identifying specific sources of emissions
Tool strengths	- Aligned with the GPC - Aligned with BISKO (German accounting standard) - Data can be exported via an API - GHG emissions data is integrated into climate action planning tool - The tool uses by default the international and national emissions factors. The municipality or region also has the possibility to add their own emissions factors. - Tool can be integrated into further use cases like municipal heat planning etc.
Tool limitations	- Available for cities in Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands but methodology can be transferred to all countries on request
Geographic location/countries	Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands
Language	German, English, French
Accessibility	Pay to use
Methodology	Emissions data is partially upscaled from local data (eg data from utilities and satellite data) and partially downscaled from publicly available national German and Swiss data sources, including national statistics for energy, waste and agricultural data and transport emissions models for transport data using population or number of employees.
Documentation of methodology	Not publicly available
Data quality/verified by 3rd party	Data quality is assessed on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high) based on whether it comes from direct measurements, locally measured data, or is downscaled from national statistics. Some of the nationally-sourced and local datasets are assessed by a third party.
Alignment with global standards and protocols (eg GPC and CRF )	Aligned with the GPC, BISKO (German standard), and STET (Stationary Energie Transportation).
Emissions scopes	1, 2 and 3 (partially)
GHGs	CO2, CH4, N2O, HFCs, PFCs, SF6, NF3 considered as CO2e
Sectors included	Transport, stationary energy, waste, AFOLU and IPPU
Scopes, GHGs and sectors excluded	Scope 3 (partially)
Temporal resolution	Annual
Spatial resolution	City boundary, county, state, country level
Functionality for city to make adjustments	Cities can choose the geographic boundary they would like to use for their inventory and do a combined emissions inventory with other cities. Cities can also input their own local data to improve the accuracy of the data outputs.
Latest accounting year	2022 (data for the previous year is uploaded in late summer of the current year)
Frequency of data updates	Annual or depending on client needs
Units	Metric tonnes (tCO2e).
Using the tool, data outputs and how it can be exported	Gaia provides total and sector-level annual emissions data for cities. The output can be exported in alignment with the GPC as an excel or csv file and can be directly inputted into a GPC-aligned inventory. The tool allows cities to adjust or improve the accuracy of the output by including their own local data. To access the tool, the city should contact enersis directly.
Additional tool functionalities	The Gaia module also helps cities with climate action planning by identifying potential areas for climate action across the building, transport and energy sectors.