Evansville climate collaborative releases first community greenhouse‑gas inventory, outlines $20 million EPA-funded projects

Evansville’s Municipal Climate Collaborative on Jan. 21 released results from its first city‑boundary community greenhouse‑gas inventory and presented plans tied to a newly awarded U.S. Environmental Protection Agency grant the collaborative said will fund resilience hubs, electric‑vehicle infrastructure and other climate projects.

“ECC worked with Climate Nav to conduct our first ever community wide greenhouse gas inventory for Evansville for the city boundaries only,” Municipal Climate Collaborative staff member Lauren Norvell said during the meeting. She said the inventory covers all sectors (stationary energy, transportation, waste and land use) and that the full report is posted on the Evansville Climate Collaborative website.

The inventory’s headline finding: Evansville’s 2023 community emissions were about 2,800,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent. By sector, Norvell reported roughly 79% of those emissions came from stationary energy, about 15% from transportation and about 6% from waste. Within the stationary energy total, Norvell said about three‑quarters of emissions were attributable to residential grid‑supplied electricity and just under 20% to residential natural gas.

Why it matters: the Collaborative said the apparent dominance of residential electricity in the local inventory points to two levers for reducing emissions—pushing the local utility’s generation mix toward renewables and increasing residential efficiency and rooftop solar uptake. Norvell noted the local utility, CenterPoint, has an integrated resource plan that the collaborative…