15 more days

Only 15 more days to go and I'm eager to get back and see everyone. The first order of business when I step of the plane is to head to the Cock of the Walk for catfish.

While I'm looking forward coming back, I'm enjoying my time and still learning alot. Just yesterday, I had two exciting experiences.

The City of Melbourne launched and internal website called CoM Green. It is an interactive site where city staff can discuss and develop environmentally sustainable initiatives with colleagues across the organization. It is all about harnessing and streamlining these efforts into a focused, organization-wide action plan for an environmentally sustainable workplace. It has been described as a Wiki-site but looks more like a blog in some instances to me. There are sections dedicated to informing city staff about initiatives taken on by the city on behalf of the public as well as internally. It also gives updates on what sustainability actions are being taken elsewhere. I really like that it gives everyone the opportunity to have a say and is a great way to help disseminate information throughout the departments and many employees. Most important, the organization utilize's current staff!

The guy who set it up agreed to meet and talk about it with me and share all the briefs and material they used to launch it. This goes right along with some ideas I've had and I hope to pass this information to my friends in the Governor's Office and possibly utilize it as part of my Capstone project with them this Fall.

Later in the day I was able to take part in a conference call/webinar with CCI City Directors from all over the world as the new emissions tracking software prepared by Microsoft for CCI/C40 was demonstrated. They are in the intial phase of getting this to the cities. There are a few kinks to work out, but I thought it was really exciting because I was actually starting to understand many of things that were being discussed and was amazed at how easy the software actually made calculating one's carbon emissions.

I think it is an extremely necessary tool, one that is often overlooked by many who work in the environmental game. The old management adage of ‘you can't manage what you don't measure’ applies as much to environmental sustainability as it does to financial performance. These numbers, along with the economics, are the numbers neccesary to justify your work.