Cities' greenhouse gas accounting methods: A study of Helsinki, Stockholm, and Copenhagen

Abstract

Cities generally adopt territorial- or production-based rather than consumption-based emissions accounting systems but they find difficult to adopt a specific emissions standard. Due to the diverse calculation methodologies cities use, inter-city emission reductions and climate action comparisons remain challenging. It is crucial to learn how cities address climate change mitigation and adaptation in terms of the emissions accounting methodologies they use, their links to existing city-level international emission standards, and the consistency of those methods used by cities to improve the quality of emissions standards. Normative case study method was applied to explore these issues in three different case cities: Helsinki (Finland), Stockholm (Sweden), and Copenhagen (Denmark). The current calculation methods used in these cities exclude many indirect emissions, and these cities have not adopted consumption-based emissions. Cities also face several dilemmas in system boundaries and baseline year setting, emissions factors calculations, and data collection methods using current calculation methods. All three case cities have adopted amendable emissions accounting systems which exclude certain amounts of emissions from several sectors. Therefore, emission calculation methods must be improved to include all possible sectors and to produce more robust and transparent calculation methods.