GRITS Goals is a suite of features that allows you to put your projects into the context of your institution’s decarbonization and resource use reduction goals, helping you turn your sustainability targets into actionable plans. You just set a baseline and a primary reduction target (with any number of intermediate targets in between) at either the institution-wide, campus/site, or individual building level, and then create different possible pathways (what we call “scenarios”) to achieve your goal.
Read more in this blog post: https://www.gogrits.org/using-grits-to-plan-and-track-progress-towards-your-sustainability-goals/
Glossary
- Baseline: The annual resource consumption or emissions figure measured over one full year
- Primary Target: A reduced annual resource consumption or emissions figure to be achieved by a future year, further into the future than any other intermediate target
- Goal: The combination of a baseline and a primary target, which lays out a resource use reduction task; for example, a baseline of 1,000 MTCO2e in 2020 and a primary target of 0 MTCO2e by 2030 represents a goal of reducing annual emissions by 1,000 MTCO2e within 10 years
- Scenario: A group of projects that reduce resource consumption and together represent one possible pathway between a goal’s baseline and its primary target; every scenario belongs to a goal
- Scale: Where the goal is taking place, either at the whole institution, campus/site, or building level
- Goal Timeframe: The period of time between a goal’s baseline and its primary target
- Projection: The amount of annual resource consumption that is expected to be achieved by a certain date according to the expected resource savings of the scenario projects and/or background projects
- Scenario Projects: The projects in your GRITS account that have been added to the scenario you’re reviewing
- Background Projects: The projects in your GRITS account that have not been added to the scenario you’re reviewing yet have relevant savings that start within its goal’s scale and timeframe; the savings of background projects are accounted for in the scenario’s “Big Picture” projection
- Candidate Projects: The projects that are eligible to be added to the scenario you’re reviewing
- Annual Resource Consumption/Emissions: The full-year rate of resource consumption or emissions at a certain point in time; for example, if a projection suggests that annual emissions will be 1,000 MTCO2e on 1/1/2030, then it means the total emissions expected to be generated between 1/1/2029 and 1/1/2030 is 1,000 MTCO2e
- Partial-Year-Adjusted Savings: The amount of savings generated by projects in a fiscal year, taking into account partial savings from projects that were installed partway through the year; these adjusted savings are used in calculations involving the actual resource consumption/emissions line, like inferred growth, because they represent the actual amount of saving likely to be achieved by the end of the year; for example, in the real world, if you installed a project on the last day of the fiscal year and took your resource consumption measurement on the next day, only one day’s worth of savings from the project would be reflected in your measurement
- Full-Year Savings: The amount of savings generated by projects if measured over a full fiscal year (i.e. not adjusting for reduced savings due to projects installed partway through the year); these savings are used in the projections because they represent the full amount of savings your projects will achieve after their first, partial fiscal year; for example, even though a project installed on the last day of the fiscal year would only contribute one day’s worth of savings in the resource consumption measurement taken on the next day, the project actually represents a much larger drop in consumption that isn’t visible yet but must be accounted for when planning towards future targets
- Contribution Stats: These stats divide the annual savings of individual projects by the distance to your scenario’s targets to indicate the amount of progress each project is expected to achieve; there are three different contribution stats that measure the distance to your targets from different starting points (the baseline, today’s date, or the target date), and they appear in the Selected Candidate Projects and the Scenario Project Attributes tables
- Actual Growth: The amount of growth in resource consumption or emissions that is shown by the actual resource consumption/emissions line
- Projected Growth: The amount of growth in resource consumption or emissions that is shown by the resource consumption/emissions projections
- Inferred Growth: The amount of growth in resource consumption or emissions that is inferred by the difference between the position of the actual resource consumption/emissions line and the total savings of scenario or background projects in the same timeframe; for example, if the total savings of scenario and background projects was 1,000 MTCO2e in 2024 and the actual resource consumption/emissions line in 2024 indicated no change from 2023, then 1,000 MTCO2e of growth is inferred to have taken place (because the savings would otherwise have caused actual consumption/emissions to fall by 1,000 MTCO2e)
- Scenario Projects Lifespan: The amount of time between the start date of the oldest project in a scenario and whichever scenario project’s expiration date is furthest in the future
- Implemented Plan: A scenario that has been designated for implementation; several changes are triggered when you mark a scenario as a plan, including the plan’s projects no longer being listed as Candidate Projects when creating new scenarios
- Breakeven Point: The time it takes for the expected financial savings of the scenario projects to cumulatively equal the total investment amount of all projects in the scenario; this is a payback period calculation, but treating the bundle of scenario projects like one big project, with savings beginning to accrue on the start date of the oldest project