News I iCET /The Climate Registry Joint Training Session

On Sunday April 26th, 2009 the entire iCET staff participated in a half day training session with Robyn Camp, vice president of The Climate Registry based in Los Angeles California. The training session was held in iCET's headquarter office in Chaoyang District in Beijing, China.

The training session was intended to provide iCET staff with an overview of The Climate Registry's program and operations. It included a review of TCR program milestones, processes and steps, inventory building exercises and introduction to TCR's reporting software, CRIS and CARROT. iCET staff had some time to present the Energy and Climate Registry to Robyn and brainstorm about the ways in which TCR's model would need to be changed to best fit a Chinese context. The latter half of the training session was devoted to brake out work groups in which iCET staff worked with Robyn to build a sample registry for iCET's HQ office. This was followed by an extensive Q&A session and final wrap-up and summary of the day's work.

In the first session, "Overview of the Registry Operations"  Robyn introduced iCET to The Climate Registry's work, structure and history. In the next session, "Developing the Inventory Management Plan,"  iCET learned how to set up and educate an internal inventory management team, plan deadlines, define organizational boundaries and facility aggregation. The third session was called, "Entering Data in CARROT and CRIS and Overview of Verification." Here iCET learned step by step how to use TCR's software including the data needed, steps to verification, necessary documentation and tips to keeping costs low. iCET also learned about the resources TCR provides to its members such as a call-in help line for reporters. In the fourth session, "Putting it all Together: Build the iCET Inventory,"  iCET staff broke into working groups and created a sample inventory of the iCET office. The final session was a working session was a working session in which we had a discussion about which elements of TCR's model are adaptable to the Energy and Climate Registry and what will need to change to fit a Chinese context.

The workshop was very successful and iCET was able to make progress in assessing needs and defining challenges for ECR, clarifying the goals, identifying milestones, developing a calendar and timeline for the project and updating and clarifying roles and responsibilities.