While climatologists around the world wrestle with the issue of climate change, Dr. Stuart Cohen and his team of Environmental & Turf Services (ETS) scientists are collaborating with Golf Resource Group (GRG), a leading golf course architecture firm, to target the carbon footprint of America’s golf courses, which total almost the size of Connecticut.
Their CARBONSAVE program is the first in the country to establish a carbon-emissions baseline for the country’s 17,000-odd golf courses. CARBONSAVE produces quantifiable carbon-emission reduction via energy-use reduction as well as carbon sequestration through turfgrass, trees, shrubs and natural grasses. It is good for the environment and it saves money.
The collaboration merges the scientific calculations of Dr. Cohen and his staff with the water- and energy-savings experience of Andrew Staples, president of the Phoenix-based GRG. Staples pioneered the first energy efficiency program for golf courses in California, a ground-breaking project that included 125 golf clubs.
Besides improving the environment, CARBONSAVE makes good business sense, Staples said. “A golf club that implements the CARBONSAVE program could realize upwards of $20,000 a year in savings. If every golf course in America signed on to the program, that could generate an estimated savings of almost $400 million each year.”
The program’s first effort — Nantucket (Mass.) Golf Club — identified the potential for 28 tons of carbon footprint reduction and approximately 10-percent decrease in golf-course energy use. The latter would lead to an additional reduction n the golf course’s carbon footprint.
The team “is a perfect example of synergy,” said Dr. Cohen, whose ETS is an interdisciplinary firm with extensive collective experience, including predicting, monitoring, preventing and managing water-quality impacts by turf chemicals. “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”
The partnership between ETS and GRG, Staples said, is “a perfect match because we come at it like a candle burning from both ends. I’ve been engaged in energy efficiency and reducing energy, Stuart from calculations and reduction of carbon.”