Case Study E: World Resources Institute: Innovations in Estimating Employee Commuting Emissions

Collecting employee commuting activity data from WRI’s 140 staff can be challenging. WRI surveys its employees once a year about their average commuting habits. In the first two years of the initiative, WRI used an Excel spreadsheet accessible to all employees on a shared internal network, but only 48 percent of them participated. Then in the third year, a simplified, web-based survey raised the employees’ participation to 65 percent. Using feedback from the survey design, WRI further simplified and refined its survey questions, made the survey more user-friendly, and reduced the time needed to complete the survey to less than a minute. The employees’ participation rate rose to 88 percent.

WRI created a tool to automate the calculation of emissions from its employees’ commuting. Once the activity data have been gathered through the online survey, the results are downloaded directly into the calculation tool which does the rest, streamlining a task that previously had been timeconsuming. A brief overview of this tool is provided in Step Four: Calculating Emissions.

Designing an easily navigated survey with clearly worded questions significantly improved the completeness and accuracy of the employees’ commuting-activity data. An added benefit was that the employees felt proud of having contributed to the inventory development process, and so this also was a positive internal communications opportunity.

WRI’s commuting data can be found in its annual GHG inventory report, available online at www.wri.org.