GHG emissions from urbanization and opportunities for urban carbon mitigation

A large body of literature has been published on urban carbon emissions and management in the last few years. This paper searches for answers to two broad questions: what do we know about the GHG emissions from urbanization at multiple scales and what are the key opportunities to mitigate GHG from cities and their efficient governance? The review suggests that the quantification of urban contribution to global, regional and national GHGs are limited to few regions and for CO2 only. The GHG emissions of urban areas differ widely for the accounting methods, scope of GHGs, emission sources and urban definition, thus, making place-based comparisons difficult. The urban system has large indirect carbon flows across the administrative and agglomeration boundaries with important policy implications. We also observed that an integrated system perspective is needed in future studies to integrate all sources, sinks, and opportunities for infrastructure and technology for carbon management. In particular, the multiple benefit assessment of climate change mitigation in cities including the potentials for combined response to the mitigation and adaptation are necessary and the research related to efficient urban carbon governance by ascertaining who can influence the urban carbon mitigation by what extent is important.

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