In partnership with the Office of Climate and Sustainability, GovEx develops an evidence-based tool to track emissions associated with business travel.

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— According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, transportation accounts for 28% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. For short trips, flying is much more carbon-intensive than rail or bus travel. At Johns Hopkins, faculty members travel the most of all affiliate types, producing more than double the emissions of administrative employees and staff.
— The Johns Hopkins University Office of Climate and Sustainability, through its Campus as a Living Lab initiative – a program that supports sustainability innovation – partnered with GovEx to build a tool to help address this problem. Using interactive visualizations with comparable statistics across all Johns Hopkins divisions, users can compare the emissions data of different methods of transportation, enabling them to make more environmentally-friendly choices as they conduct their business.
— We sit down with four contributors to the project to discuss how the tool was built and how cities can use it as a model to support their own climate change initiatives: Sara Betran de Lis, Director of Research and Analytics at GovEx; Heather Bree, Data Visualization and D3 Developer at GovEx; Debi Denney, Assistant Director of Johns Hopkins Office of Climate & Sustainability; and Rose Weeks, Senior Research Associate at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, working with the Campus as a Living Lab Program at the Office of Climate & Sustainability.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, transportation accounts for 28% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. For short trips, flying is much more carbon-intensive than rail or bus travel. At Johns Hopkins, faculty members travel the most of all affiliate types, producing more than double the emissions of administrative employees and staff.
The Johns Hopkins University Office of Climate and Sustainability, through its Campus as a Living Lab initiative – a program that supports sustainability innovation – partnered with GovEx to build a tool to help address this problem. Using interactive visualizations with comparable statistics across all Johns Hopkins divisions, users can compare the emissions data of different methods of transportation, enabling them to make more environmentally-friendly choices as they conduct their business.
We sit down with four contributors to the project to discuss how the tool was built and how cities can use it as a model to support their own climate change initiatives: Sara Betran de Lis, Director of Research and Analytics at GovEx; Heather Bree, Data Visualization and D3 Developer at GovEx; Debi Denney, Assistant Director of Johns Hopkins Office of Climate & Sustainability; and Rose Weeks, Senior Research Associate at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, working with the Campus as a Living Lab Program at the Office of Climate & Sustainability.