Speaker
Description
Cities across the globe are actively working to reduce their carbon footprint, with a common approach being the development of neighbourhood and district level pilots. However, whilst such interventions are well meaning and grounded in a will to reduce the city’s carbon impact, the data to validate and inform such approaches is often lacking. To this end, many cities rely upon city-wide carbon emission datasets, downscaled from national emission inventories, which lack the granularity to support such pilots. Here a misalignment of data and context is present, resulting in the emission impacts of such neighbourhood level projects as being unquantifiable. This presentation serves to highlight approaches to closing this gap between carbon emission data and practices centred around reducing emissions within decarbonisation projects and the city as a whole. This is initially structured around outlining the current state of carbon accounting within European cities, and the data available to practitioners and decision makers, before expanding into the cutting edge of urban carbon accounting currently being conducted within academia. Here the concept of urban carbon emission data maturity is discussed, outlining the prerequisite resources, capacities and data availability required for city authorities to conduct more advanced carbon accounting.
