Benchmarking

Benchmarking

Benchmarking is a beneficial practice for making informed decisions and assessing the effectiveness of policies concerning relevant systems and policies surrounding environmental services such as water, wastewater, and stormwater. In particular, financial benchmarking provides meaningful financial context to governments and organizations when making policy decisions. Through surveying, data compilation, and visualization, communities are better able to establish sustainable practices in their environmental programs.

The Environmental Finance Center employs benchmarking in a variety of ways concerning environmental services and systems. Our benchmarking supports decision-makers in making more informed data-based decisions without the need to navigate all underlying data. We provide broad analysis using secondary data sources, including financial, demographic, system characteristics, and geographic data.

Our current and previous work employs the use of surveys to collect data on topics including water and sewer rates, asset management, stormwater, and more. Examples of current projects that work to collect relevant data in the environmental finance field include the rates dashboards, the stormwater rates dashboard, a stormwater management survey, and others. Additionally, the Environmental Finance Center specializes in the use of data visualization to convey important data concerning decisions surrounding environmental programs and services. This is all possible thanks to the compilation of relevant data by EFC staff.