California Department of Water Resources Baseline Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory 1990

The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) provides water management and planning services for the State of California. DWR is located within the California Natural Resources Agency.

DWR’s operations include ownership, operation, and maintenance of the State Water Project (SWP), operations and maintenance of flood protection facilities throughout the Central Valley, administration of several grant programs which dispense state funds to local and regional water authorities, and regulatory authority over dam safety throughout California.

This baseline greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions inventory has been developed to supplement information provided in DWR’s Climate Action Plan Phase I: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction Plan (GGERP) (http://www.water.ca.gov/climatechange/CAP.cfm). The GGERP documents DWR’s historical, current, and projected future GHG emissions, establishes and articulates GHG emissions reduction goals for 2020 and 2050, and describes the GHG emissions reduction measures that DWR will implement to achieve those goals.

In the GGERP, GHG emissions are broken up into four categories: Operation, Construction, Maintenance, and Business Activities. Emissions are broken up in this way because they relate to key distinctions in the way activities are managed within DWR and the ways in which GHG emissions reduction measures can be implemented within DWR’s existing organizational structure. This inventory is organized to comply with the GHG Protocol? Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard developed by the World Resources Institute and World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

Therefore, this inventory accounts for GHG emissions from DWR activities under the categories of Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. The information in this inventory is consistent with the information provided in the GGERP, uses the same base data, and only differs in the ways in which the data are categorized and summed.