{"id":2174,"date":"2026-04-22T13:50:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T13:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/shi-institute\/?p=2174"},"modified":"2026-04-23T15:22:57","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T15:22:57","slug":"data-for-a-greener-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/shi-institute\/data-for-a-greener-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Data for a Greener FUture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Working on Furman\u2019s Greenhouse Gas Report has helped me understand how small actions can make big impacts. Something as small as swapping a lightbulb can save enough energy to power a home! At a scale as large as Furman, these\u00a0seemingly tiny\u00a0actions will be pivotal to achieving our goal of being carbon neutral by 2040<\/a>.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My name is Kate\u00a0Buckley,\u00a0and I\u00a0am\u00a0the\u00a0Sustainability Assessment Fellow this year at the Shi Institute.\u00a0\u00a0As a\u00a0senior sustainability science student\u00a0and aspiring sustainability specialist, this fellowship\u00a0has allowed me to see a side of\u00a0real-world\u00a0sustainability that I\u00a0couldn\u2019t\u00a0see in my classrooms.\u00a0<\/span> \"Student<\/span><\/p>\n

From the hours spent communicating with stakeholders gathering data to the hours spent analyzing and reporting data, I have faced many challenges in compiling Furman\u2019s annual greenhouse gas report. Ensuring our data is\u00a0accurate\u00a0and precise is essential for generating\u00a0an accurate\u00a0greenhouse gas report.\u00a0We\u00a0have to\u00a0make lots of assumptions about some of our data because it is imperfect or incomplete.\u00a0These\u00a0problems created amazing learning opportunities for me to\u00a0help with improving\u00a0our reporting practices.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One piece of difficult data was our Study Away Travel. I received this piece of data with minimal information \u2013 just the number of participants on each program and what cities they flew to. From this, I found the flight miles of each trip; our first assumption was that all participants flew on the same plane. We know this is\u00a0most likely not\u00a0100% true as many times students must\u00a0purchase\u00a0their own flights, but it is the best assumption we could make to ensure we\u00a0didn\u2019t\u00a0over or under report the emissions. Next, I had to reach out to the help desk of our reporting platform, SIMAP, to double check what exactly we were supposed to report, flight miles or passenger miles. I discovered that I needed to multiply the flight miles I calculated for each program by the number of participants to report the passenger miles accurately. This correction has improved this year\u2019s report, and the knowledge gained will improve future reports. Being able to contribute to Furman\u2019s sustainability commitments this year has been so meaningful, even in a small way, fixing one reporting strategy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Graph

Furman’s emissions by category in FY 2024. Electricity is almost 40% of our total carbon footprint. Making small swaps, like more efficient lights, has helped us reduce our consumption and emissions.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Working on Furman\u2019s Greenhouse Gas Report has helped me understand how small actions can make big impacts. Something as small as swapping a lightbulb can save enough energy to power […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2175,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[15,14],"class_list":["post-2174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-student-blog","tag-furman-innovation-lab","tag-sustainability"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/shi-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/shi-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/shi-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/shi-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/shi-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2174"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/shi-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2183,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/shi-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2174\/revisions\/2183"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/shi-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/shi-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/shi-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/shi-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}