Regional Indicators Initiative

A Foundation for Local Climate Action

LHB’s development of the Regional Indicators Initiative began in 2010 with the question of how cities can determine whether they are moving the needle toward their sustainability goals. Following the theory, “what gets measured gets managed”, we translated our building-scale performance metrics approach to the community scale, providing dozens of Minnesota cities with multiple years of energy, travel, water, waste, and greenhouse gas emissions data. RII has expanded to include additional tools that local governments can use to inform climate planning and action. The tools currently available include: case studies of exemplar cities, a wedge diagram tool to explore the impacts of reduction strategies, and energy planning templates. This effort has contributed to building a foundation for local climate action planning. Now a nationally-recognized model, we continue to work on institutionalizing this effort so that more cities and counties will have ongoing access to their annual data.