Consumption-based screening of climate change footprints for cities worldwide

With long-term prospects indicating worldwide increasing urbanization over the next decades, cities are responsible for a growing share of global greenhouse gas emissions. This makes local policies more important in mitigating climate change, and calls for efficient tools allowing local decision makers to measure the impact of urban areas under their control. This study introduces a parsimonious screening tool to cater to this need and allow local governments to gauge and monitor consumption-based climate change footprint of cities. The tool consists of multiple-regression models that operate on easily accessible city data. To demonstrate its applica-bility, the per capita climate change footprint is estimated for 949 cities. Australian cities are found to have the highest per-capita footprint, averaging 20.4 t CO2-eq, while South American cities have the lowest per-capita footprint, averaging 8.1 t CO2-eq. The results are evaluated against IPCC climate change mitigation pathways to judge which cities are on track to an absolute sustainable level of greenhouse gas emissions. Few cities are found to be on track to comply with the necessary levels for 2030, and the findings thus substantiate that cities all over the planet need major actions to comply with the required climate change mitigation.

Automated summary

With increasing urbanization, cities play a significant role in global greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, it is important to develop tools to help local governments measure and monitor the consumption-based climate change footprint of cities. This study introduces a parsimonious screening tool that uses easily accessible city data and multiple regression models. The findings show that only a few cities are on track to achieve the necessary levels for greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, highlighting the need for major actions in cities worldwide to mitigate climate change.