2023 Carbon Day Data Collection Form
Use this form to submit your organization’s 2022 energy-use carbon emission totals. Instructions to help you locate your totals in ENERGY STAR PortfolioManager are included here and on the form. If you use another method to measure energy consumption, please see the Excel tool link on the form. Carbon Day Forms are due by 11:59pm (ET) on June 1, 2023. We will announce the results on Carbon Day, June 16, 2023.
Sign Up to Participate
US cultural organization’s can sign up here for the Carbon Inventory Project. Your participation encourages others, and a growing list shows the sector’s growing commitment to understanding and reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from energy use. Join your colleagues who have already signed up and opted to share their names in participation:
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Anchorage Museum, Atlanta History Center, Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Center of Science and Industry (COSI), Chicago Children’s Museum, Children’s Museum of Eau Claire, Children’s Museum of Illinois, Chumash Indian Museum, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden, Clark Art Institute, Creative Discovery Museum, Customs House Museum and Cultural Center, Denver Art Museum, Exploratorium, Filoli Center, Ford House, Haggerty Museum of Art, Hauser & Wirth, Henry Art Gallery, Historic New England, La Plata County Historical Society-Animas Museum, Madison Children’s Museum, Meeteetse Museum District, Minnesota Marine Art Museum, Museum of POP Culture, Museum of Russian Icons, Museum of Russian Icons, National Blues Museum, National Gallery of Art, National Nordic Museum, Paul Revere Memorial Association-Paul Revere House, Rochester Art Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Science Museum of Minnesota, Speed Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Toledo Museum of Art, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, The Wild Center, Wilson Museum, and Yale University Art Gallery.
Please help us promote CIP!
CIP benefits individual cultural institutions and the entire sector. We’ve provided general information to use with four images related to CIP and would appreciate the initiative being promoted in any upcoming newsletter, meeting, conference, or social media post. Download the Communications information and images to recruit your peers to participate. For questions or if additional information is needed please contact us at hello@ecprs.org.
Upcoming Events
Click here to view all Carbon Inventory Project events. Contact us for questions or more information.
Previous Events
View all webinars on our YouTube channel here.
Participant Experiences on May 25, 2023. Attendees learned about the experiences of gathering and reporting energy data from Carbon Inventory Project and Culture Over Carbon participants, Marissa Mayo of Historic New England and Melanie Trottier-Mitcheson from the Museum of Russian Icons.
How to Upload Carbon Day Data on April 18, 2023. Attendees learned about the form for submitting Carbon Day totals and how to locate Carbon Day data in Energy Star Portfolio Manager. Also shared in this session was an alternative for participants that do not use Energy Star and use another method to measure energy use.
Reporting Delivered and Generated Fuel on March 23, 2023. Attendees learned about reporting delivered and generated fuel in a presentation by New Buildings Institute.
EPA Staff Presentation on February 23, 2023. Attendees learned about Energy Star Portfolio Manager from EPA staff.
Parent Issues: Reporting on January 23, 2023. Attendees learned about reporting strategies for museums that are part of a parent organization.
ESPM and You on December 15, 2022. Attendees learned how to use Energy Star Portfolio Manager (ESPM).
Carbon Inventory Project Kickoff: Introduction to Benchmarking on October 31, 2022 1pm ET. Attendees learned about the Carbon Inventory Project, how it relates to the Culture Over Carbon project, how to participate, participation expectations and benefits.
Background
The Carbon Inventory Project (CIP) is part of the IMLS National Leadership Grant research project Culture Over Carbon: Understanding Museums’ Energy Use. This Project will provide training and resources for cultural institutions to organize their energy data and calculate their institution’s carbon footprint associated with energy use October 2022 – June 2023. The feedback we received during Phase One of Culture Over Carbon identified collecting energy data as the biggest barrier to research participation.
For individual institutions, benchmarking energy data is a high-return, low-risk effort museums with multiple benefits:
- Better energy and carbon management decisions
- saving money
- decreasing their carbon footprint
- preparing for pending building-related local policies
For the sector, calculating a sector-wide carbon footprint, as the grant is doing, will enable:
- Quantitatively tracking the sector’s progress to decreasing its footprint
- Setting a footprint reduction goal
- Hold ourselves accountable for the sector’s emissions
- Better recognize carbon footprint reduction work being done in the sector
- Contribute to and communicate the sector’s footprint in reports and studies, including the U.S. National Determined Contributions
- Easily report energy and carbon data to jurisdictions or future research on the sector.
Carbon Day
Carbon’s atomic number is 6 (June). Oxygen’s atomic number is 8 – there are two of them in Carbon Dioxide (so 8 x 2 = 16). Carbon Day is June 16th of every year.
Got Heat? How about cooling, humidification? How about lights, refrigerators or hot water? And what about increased fresh air intake? Then join your peers whose museums use energy in their galleries, storage rooms, cafes, shops, education rooms, hallways, and reception areas as the US museum field prepares for the first annual Carbon Day, June 16, 2023.
Carbon Day 2023 will be the first reporting milestone in the work to build sector-wide capacity and commitment to calculating and reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from energy use. This effort is part of Culture Over Carbon, an IMLS National Leadership grant studying energy use in museums, zoos, gardens, aquariums and historic sites. So it’s free to you.
Environment and Culture Partners (ECP), New Buildings Institute (NBI) and New England Museum Association (NEMA) are teaming up to help museum staff comfortably develop and submit annual energy use carbon calculations, then contribute it (anonymously) to the sector’s total footprint for 2022. We do this so that each participating institution, and the entire sector, can take responsibility for its carbon impacts, and demonstrate its capacity for high-impact climate action.
Whether you’ve been logging energy data for years, or are so new to this you don’t know who at your museum knows how much energy we use, we want you to join in – you and your data count!
Energy use in buildings is one of the largest sources of emissions, and we all know museums can be energy hogs. We can only begin to manage that consumption (and fund efforts to reduce it) if we understand our own energy use first. We know firsthand that making the time and building the process and internal systems to measure energy use can be challenging the first time around.
Between October 2022 through May 2023 we’ll give you the information, skills and encouragement you need to use the free software Energy Star Portfolio Manager to record and save your data, making the process clearer and easier to complete. For support and encouragement, please drop in as you like to two how-to webinars, five different office hour opportunities, and sessions to hear from your peers.
If you’re a beginner, we’ll help you build the practices you need to make energy reporting clearer and regular. We’ll help you share your total energy use and carbon emissions so that it adds up to the sector total. Then in 2023 and each year after, if you submit your previous year’s total by June 1, it will be included in the sector’s Carbon Count announced on June 16th, Carbon Day.
All Events
All events are times are in Eastern US Time Zone and the duration is one hour.
