From Biology to Emissions Accounting and Everything in-between: Kiona Lo’s experience at EFI

–  By Anna Stratton, Kiona Lo, and Peri Dworatzek – 

Kiona Lo was attracted to the Ecological Footprint Initiative (EFI) because of the application of informatics in the interdisciplinary field of environmental studies. Kiona has a science background, having earned her undergraduate degree in biology. Kiona discovered in working with the data in her first summer that she wasn’t creating data so much as quality checking the data that was coming in. Her preoccupation was not so much with the data points themselves, but quality checking the data to see if it had been uploaded correctly and that no changes had been made unintentionally.

In the first summer Kiona was a data analyst, she was working primarily on fish data (or “fishstat”) from the FAO – Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN. She was surprised to see weird or inconsistent things pop up, not so much in the reporting itself, but seeing changes in countries. There are lessons embedded in the data. She found the data being supplied from the FAO was sometimes different from the country itself, for example, this was the case in Australia. She had to find out how the data was different and why and how to rectify. She also found it curious that marine mammals are not included in the accounts, given her background in biology.  

“The data is not just numbers – it means something and one needs to interpret it” . Another puzzle is the changing names of countries and having to go back to track changes over time – for example with the USSR and South Sudan among many others – if countries change, the data needs to reflect that.

Kiona was able to bring her experience with the EFI to her master’s research, on the current practices and best practices to measure and reduce procurement emissions in higher education institutions. She then applied the knowledge from her master’s research to a project she led with EFI, reporting on York University’s total emissions from 2016-2023. This is distilled into an emission report, link here. Kiona worked on this project with Eric Miller, Director of EFI. This is innovative research going beyond what many other Canadian universities report on, because this report includes Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. Many other universities report only on Scope 1 and 2 emissions because they are simpler to calculate. In doing this work, she learned about the breadth of work involved in reporting emissions for an organization, from data collection to stakeholder communication and results dissemination. “This is very different compared to doing the research, the work itself”.

Kiona is interested in emission data in particular and using data to promote sustainability in the private sector. She sees businesses needing to change into a setting for sustainability. She sees this evolving as a strategic business imperative, embedding sustainability within the operation of private companies.