City-Level Carbon Emission for European Cities: Accounting Methodology and Applications | Yuru Guan

Field l Discipline

• Environmental Sciences
• Sustainable development
• Climate change

Expertise

• Input-output analysis
• Network analysis
• Emission accounts

Summary

Cities are central to climate change mitigation. City-level carbon emissions vary significantly due to differences in resource endowments, energy mix, technologies, and economic structures, and inter-regional trade. Carbon emissions accounting is considered as a fundamental step for analyzing carbon emission characteristics, identifying key emission paths, formulating emission reduction policies, promoting economic transformation and mitigating climate change.

Most of the current carbon emissions inventories in Europe are at the national level, and sectors are aggregated and often differ from study to study. There are limited evaluations of carbon emissions inventories for European cities and their urban climate action plans, due to the lack of consistent accounting methodologies, inter-agency coordination and sparse data available on socio-economic aspects and policy implementation. This research proposal will address this issue.

The first aim is to develop a feasible methodology for constructing CO2 emissions inventories from fossil energy consumption and industrial processes for a series of European cities. Then, based on environmentally extended input-output and other relevant analysis methods, we will investigate and reveal the emission characteristics, transfer trend and emission reduction responsibilities of different activity sectors from different accounting scopes at sub-national level. It is worth mentioning that the above methodology will be generally applicable and can be extended to all European cities. The findings are expected to provide a scientific basis for the formulation and implementation of future mitigation policy.

Supervision by

• Promotor Prof. dr. K.S. (Klaus) Hubacek | Integrated Research on Energy, Environment and Society - IREES | ESRIG, University of Groningen.
• Co-promotor Prof. dr. H. (Huilin) Chen | Centre for Isotope Research - CIO | ESRIG, University of Groningen.
• Daily supervisor Dr. Y. (Yuli) Shan | Integrated Research on Energy, Environment and Society - IREES | ESRIG, University of Groningen.

More information and contact details can be found on the personal profile of Yuru Guan