Regional Carbon Footprinting for Municipalities and Cities

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. 1. Background In May 2013, the carbon dioxide emission level passed 400 ppm for the first time since measurements began at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii 3 . Several emission forecasts found that trends in GHG emissions are likely to cause global warming in the range of 3.5 to 5 degree Celsius by 2100 [1] [2] [3] which is related to “dangerous” and “extremely dangerous” climate change impacts [4]. In recent years, the European Union and several countries set relatively ambiguous targets for GHG reductions that consequently affect policies at the regional and local level. An increasing number of cities and regions developed climate change policies and climate action plans, e.g., within the framework of the Leipzig Charter on Sustainable European Cities, the Covenant of Mayors or the European Energy Award. However, regional and local climate change actions require observing GHG emission sources in order to identify potential reduction measurements and to monitor their implementation. While there are complex models on anthropogenic climate change available on the global scale, there is no consensual and consistent methodological GHG accounting standard for smaller regions. Various existing tools fail to balance scientific adequacy and pragmatic usability. For that purpose, the present paper describes a “Regional Carbon Footprint”-software as a basic instrument for local and regional climate change management and energy concepts. 2. Methodology The methodology to calculate Regional Carbon Footprints (RCF) refers to the indicator carbon footprint that is used to indicate the amount of greenhouse gas emissions related to the life cycle of products or to activities of organizations, individuals or – as in case of RCF – populations. Carbon footprints refer to the global warming potential (GWP) of different greenhouse gases and are given 1 University of Applied Sciences Zittau/Görlitz, 02763 Zittau, Germany, [email protected], Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Science 2 University of Applied Sciences Zittau/Görlitz, 02826 Görlitz, Germany, {jlaessig,dtasche,jheider}@hszg.de, Department of Computer Science 3 http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/\#mlo (2013-07-04) Copyright 2014 BIS-Verlag, Oldenburg, ISBN: 978-3-8142-2317-9