How to Write an RFP for a Community Greenhouse Gas Inventory

New York’s Climate Smart Communities guidance notes that government operations typically account for less than three percent of a community’s emissions. The rest comes from homes, businesses, vehicles and landfills that the local government does not meter, so a community greenhouse gas inventory is mostly careful estimation. Estimation you can repeat next year is an asset. Estimation you can’t repeat is a one-time chart.

A community greenhouse gas inventory estimates the emissions from all activity within a jurisdiction’s boundary for a given year, by sector and scope, under a named protocol. You need one to set targets, write a climate action plan or report progress. The RFP succeeds when it fixes the methods so the next inventory is comparable.

What this work should deliver

The outcome is a baseline you can defend, a method document you can hand to the next analyst, and a workbook your staff can rerun. Community carbon accounting rewards consistency more than precision, and the report itself is the least durable part. If the RFP buys only the report, you will buy the whole inventory again in three years.

Set these boundaries before you write tasks:

• Geography. Use your own boundary. New York’s program will not award points for a county or regional inventory submitted by a municipality; the data must match municipal limits.
• Community, operations or both. Redmond, Washington’s 2024 analysis followed ICLEI’s U.S. Community Protocol for the community and ICLEI’s Local Government Operations Protocol for city operations, as two separate inventories.
• Protocol and level. Choose the GPC at BASIC or BASIC+, or the U.S. Community Protocol, and say so.
• Years. Name the inventory year and any earlier years to restate with the same methods.
• Extras. Decide now whether you want a forecast or a consumption-based supplement, since each adds cost.

Who this is for. Sustainability and planning staff at cities, counties, tribes, territories and regional councils, including municipal climate officers, who need a first baseline or an update, usually ahead of a climate action plan. It is the wrong template for a company or agency footprint, which follows the corporate GHG Protocol and has its own corporate inventory RFP guide, and for a stand-alone government operations inventory.

Rules and standards to cite

No federal law requires a community inventory. The standards below define what "compliant" means, and the data status notes tell bidders what they can and can’t rely on. Our local climate policy hub tracks the state programs that change these rules.

• The GPC. The Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Inventories, developed by WRI, C40 and ICLEI, is now version 1.1, revised to align with the IPCC’s 2019 refinement. It sorts emissions into scope 1 (sources inside the boundary), scope 2 (grid energy used inside it) and scope 3 (other emissions outside the boundary caused by activity within it). Its executive summary sets two reporting levels. BASIC covers stationary energy, transportation and waste; BASIC+ adds industrial processes, agriculture and land use, and transboundary transport. The GPC requires notation keys to justify any excluded source, and it leaves verification optional.
• The U.S. Community Protocol. ICLEI’s version 1.2 requires five basic emissions-generating activities: community electricity use, residential and commercial fuel use, on-road vehicle travel, energy for water and wastewater, and waste generated by the community. It prefers origin-destination allocation of vehicle trips over counting travel inside the boundary. Since October 2023, the protocol also comes in Dash and Plus tiers alongside the Standard.
• State programs. New York’s program accepts inventories under its state guidance, the U.S. Community Protocol or the GPC, published within five years of the application.
• Global warming potentials. EPA’s reporting rule adopted IPCC Fifth Assessment Report 100-year values for reports submitted from 2025. Specify a set and keep it.
• Federal data status. EPA extended the 2025 facility reporting deadline to October 30, 2026, and its September 2025 proposal would remove reporting obligations for 46 source categories; that proposal is not final. EPA’s latest final national and state-level inventories still end at 2022, as of September 2026.
• Procurement. With federal grant money, 2 CFR 200.319 excludes firms that drafted the scope from competing, which matters when the firm behind your last inventory helps write this RFP. 2 CFR 200.320 requires published factors and a price factor.

Sample scope of work

Six tasks cover most inventories. Add the seventh only if you need it.

Task 1. Methods memo. Every later dispute traces back to a decision made here.

Within 20 days of notice to proceed, the Consultant shall deliver a methods memo stating the boundary, protocol and reporting level, inventory year and restated years, gases and global warming potential values, the on-road transportation method, electricity emission factor sources, and the notation key for each excluded source. The Consultant shall not begin calculations until the [City/County] approves the memo.

Task 2. Data requests. Start the slowest requests first.

The Consultant shall prepare data request templates for electric and gas utilities, fuel suppliers, solid waste and wastewater operators, transportation agencies and large facilities, issue them in the first two weeks, and maintain a data request log showing each request, response date, gaps and the method used to fill each gap.

Check state data before you pay anyone to collect it. New York’s Utility Energy Registry publishes electricity and gas use for cities, towns and villages under a Public Service Commission order, with fields that fail a privacy screen withheld. That screen can hide a small town’s commercial load, so the gap-filling method belongs in the memo.

Task 3. Calculations and quality control.

The Consultant shall calculate emissions by gas, sector and scope in an unlocked workbook that traces every result to its activity data and emission factor, and shall document quality control checks, a key category analysis and a qualitative uncertainty assessment for each sector.

Task 4. Restatement and trends. The U.S. Community Protocol describes contribution analysis, which splits a change between inventories into drivers such as emission factors, population, per capita use and weather.

The Consultant shall restate [prior inventory years] using the approved methods, separate changes caused by method or data revisions from changes in activity, and present a contribution analysis of the change since the base year.

Task 5. Reporting. Say where the numbers must go.

The Consultant shall deliver a report with a plain-language summary, sector charts and a methods appendix, and shall complete the reporting templates required for [CDP-ICLEI Track, the Global Covenant of Mayors or a state program].

Dubuque’s 2023 RFP asked for the C40 reporting spreadsheet tied to its Global Covenant of Mayors commitment and a written statement that the inventory complies with the GPC.

Task 6. Repeatability and handoff.

The Consultant shall deliver data collection worksheets, calculation files and a written procedure that allow [City/County] staff to complete the next inventory, and shall train staff in one working session. Where a licensed platform is used, the Consultant shall export all inputs and outputs to editable files the [City/County] retains.

Task 7 (optional). Forecast or consumption-based supplement.

The Consultant shall project emissions to [2030 and 2050] under a business-as-usual scenario, or prepare a consumption-based estimate reported separately from the protocol inventory and never summed with it.

Deliverables to require

• Methods memo, approved before calculations begin.
• Data request templates and the data request log with every gap and fill method.
• Unlocked calculation workbook with activity data, factors, sources and global warming potential values.
• Notation key table for every source category in the chosen protocol.
• Quality control record, key category analysis and uncertainty notes.
• Restated prior years and a trend analysis that separates method changes from real change.
• Report with a plain-language summary, plus completed reporting templates.
• An improvement plan naming the data that would most improve the next inventory.
• A staff procedure and a training session, with all files exported from any licensed tool.

Puerto Rico’s 2025 request is a good model at the larger end. It requires uncertainty estimates, a key category analysis, a quality control plan and an improvement plan for every sector.

How to evaluate proposals

Published RFPs lean even harder on method. Puerto Rico’s gives 45% to methodology and 15% each to qualifications, cost and experience. Dubuque screened proposals without seeing fees to build a short list, reserved the option to interview it, and asked for separate prices for the BASIC and BASIC+ levels.

If federal grant money pays, publish every factor and its weight and score price, as 2 CFR 200.320 requires for work that is not architecture or engineering. Ask finalists to walk through one sector’s calculation live. It separates teams that build inventories from teams that manage the people who do.

Timeline

In the published guidance and RFPs we reviewed, a community inventory takes three to six months of consultant time. The phase durations below are suggested allocations within that range.

Expect a lag between the inventory year and the report. Redmond’s 2024 summary is dated December 2025, and Truckee, California targets June 2027 for its 2025 inventory. Federal data lags further, so any sector a consultant downscales from EPA’s state inventories will reflect 2022 conditions.

Budget and cost drivers

Two published figures bracket the market:

• Dubuque, Iowa (2023): a $25,000 project budget for community inventories of 2019 through 2022 under the GPC, with separate prices for BASIC and BASIC+.
• Puerto Rico (2025): a $400,000 maximum for territory-wide inventories of 2022 through 2024, projections to 2040 under several scenarios, digital reporting forms and a data platform, issued under its EPA Climate Pollution Reduction Grant planning work.

Some jurisdictions pay nothing for the core data. The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments completes community inventories for all 24 of its member governments, with results through 2023. Robbinsdale, Minnesota’s 2026 RFP points bidders to inventory data from the Regional Indicators Initiative, and EPA’s Local Greenhouse Gas Inventory Tool is free. If your region does the math, buy analysis instead of data.

What moves cost:

• The number of inventory years, including restated baselines.
• BASIC versus BASIC+, since industrial processes and land use need data most cities lack.
• Utility cooperation and privacy screens that force estimation.
• Large industrial sources, now that federal facility data is delayed.
• Transportation modeling, especially origin-destination methods.
• Forecasts, consumption-based supplements and dashboards.

Joint procurement cuts cost. Redmond updated its 2024 inventory with Bellevue, Issaquah, Kirkland and Mercer Island to reduce costs through economies of scale and to align with King County’s inventories.

Red flags in proposals

• Names no protocol or level, or promises a "hybrid" of several.
• Leaves the vehicle travel method open, or changes it from your last inventory without a restatement.
• Delivers results only inside a licensed platform, with no editable workbook.
• Mixes global warming potential sets or emission factor years without saying so.
• Reports a large change from the last inventory without separating method changes from real change.
• Drops sectors silently instead of using notation keys.
• Assumes 2025 federal facility data will be available on schedule, with no fallback.

How we’d approach it

We’d spend the first month on the methods memo and the data requests, because those two documents decide whether the next inventory will be comparable. We’d also ask early whether a regional council, a state program or a neighboring city already collects the same data. Once the baseline exists, our guide on how to create a climate action plan, the guide to the GHG Protocol and the decarbonization hub cover what comes next.