The designers of facilities are also key participants in decisions about the scope, materials, and procedures to be used in construction, and thus the amount of carbon embedded in the materials and emitted as a result of construction. The rehabilitation, retrofit, and recycling of existing infrastructure and materials takes advantage of the fact that carbon was already emitted during the production process of existing concrete, steel, brick, and wood. As with the pursuit of lower carbon emissions in the operation of facilities, designing for lower carbon embedded or emitted during construction necessitates a shift in the process, references, and expertise utilized.

# _Expanding the time horizon of the capital investment plan_

The purpose of extending the timeframe is to allow the capital investment plan to reflect, more directly, the goals expressed in long‐range plans, and to create the expectation of exhibiting, in the capital investment plan, the savings to operations and maintenance that are made possible through low‐carbon investments. The intention is for plans to result in a set of proposals plausibly financed in current and immediate future budget years, with a more coherent picture of their fiscal impact and ties to other planned future commitments.

# _Forecasting carbon from projects proposed in the capital investment plan_

Local governments that forecast the aggregated carbon anticipated from proposed infrastructure projects in their capital investment plan will be taking a critical step toward recognizing, and thus potentially avoiding, unnecessary contributions to global warming.

Measuring carbon in the capital investment planning process will also allow for the direct transfer of information from a local government’s greenhouse gas inventory to its capital investment plan, and vice versa. Quantifying a city’s emissions allows the government to identify which sectors contribute most to overall GHG emissions and thereby strategize how best to reduce those emissions. The capital investment plan is the most opportune place to apply inventory information, if it is to be put to use in reducing emissions.

The emissions accounting for infrastructure assets in local government’s greenhouse gas inventory can be used as a “conventional” baseline scenario, against which to measure reduction potential from the climate‐informed capital investment planning process. Establishing a conventional project to compare against mitigation alternatives is extremely important for quantifying greenhouse gas reductions (World Resource Institute, 2005, 50). Having an inventory can also ease the effort of forecasting future emissions from proposed projects. However, given the availability of numerous tools and calculators for estimating emissions from buildings and other various types of infrastructure, it may be fairly easy for local governments and special purpose organizations to forecast measures of emissions for proposed projects, even if they do not yet have a greenhouse gas inventory.

One common emissions accounting protocol, Local Government Operations Protocol, developed in a partnership between The Climate Registry, ICLEI, and others, requires a local government to determine the emissions from its infrastructure assets in one of two ways. Local governments with continuous emission monitoring systems can use those systems to directly monitor emissions produced in the exhaust stream of the asset. Local governments without this technology can estimate emissions by Page | 18