The EU has actively invested in climate change mitigation in recent decades, successfully reducing territorial greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, consumption-based emissions have been largely overlooked. In particular, local climate action has excluded significant upstream emissions associated with urban activities occurring beyond municipal borders. Current city-level GHG accounting frameworks and practices in the EU typically exclude scope 3 emissions, but these often dominate cities’ GHG footprints. Cities need consumption-based GHG accounting frameworks to support ambitious and effective local climate action. Existing methods to increase the comprehensiveness of city-level GHG accounting include top-down input-output approaches and bottom-up process-based life-cycle approaches. Top-down methods have limited local actionability: they are unable to effectively inform and monitor local climate action because they lack the context-specific connection with physical flows and tangible urban activities that can be shaped by local action. On the other hand, bottom-up methods have been considered impractical due to their high data and modelling requirements. Cities need bottom-up methods and representative data that can be widely applicable to develop comprehensive and actionable consumption-based GHG emission inventories.

BASTOS Joana;  MONFORTI-FERRARIO Fabio; 

2026-07-14

DSRPT

JRC146986

3052-3761 (online),   

https://journalofsustainability.net/ojs/JoS/article/view/210,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC146986,   

10.55845/jos-2026-22210 (online),