Regional Carbon Footprinting for Municipalities and Cities

Abstract

This paper describes a methodology to account and attribute greenhouse gas emissions on a regional level. Regional greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories support the development and monitoring of climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies and policies for municipalities and cities. However, information and scientific expertise on climate change impacts are complex and a consensual and consistent methodology on formation of regional GHG inventories is still missing. Available methodologies and calculation tools mostly fail to balance scientific adequacy and usability from a pragmatic perspective. Within the project Regional Carbon Footprint (RCF), software that allows data management (i.e. for bottom up data) in order to calculate regional greenhouse gas inventories and to report about regional carbon footprints has been developed. Efforts needed for data collection turned out to be the main bottleneck for application from a practitioner's point of view. The RCF approach overcomes these shortcomings by closing this gap with the use of top down data taken from statistics.