Tool: Carbon Monitor Cities

Carbon Monitor Cities is an online CO2 emissions dataset developed by a group of universities and climate technology firms. It provides near-real-time daily city-level CO2 emissions data for 1500 cities in 46 countries.

Specifications

Suitable for which city climate journey stage?	Identifying specific sources of emissions Tracking progress overtime
Tool strengths	- Recent, near-real time, daily data enables more detailed understanding of temporal changes in emissions - Publicly available, scientifically peer-reviewed methodology
Tool limitations	- Not aligned with GPC or CRF - Provides CO2 data only - Only provides Scope 1 emissions - Poor coverage in Africa, Middle East and South-East Asia
Geographic location/countries	Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Myanmar, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Vietnam
Language	English
Accessibility	Free to use
Methodology	Carbon Monitor Cities data is downscaled from Carbon Monitor, a near-real-time national level dataset of daily CO2 emissions that has been monitoring variations of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement production at a global scale since January 2019, and its global gridded version: GRACED. Carbon Monitor estimates daily CO2 emissions from a range of activity data, including hourly to daily electrical power generation data, monthly production data and production indices of industry processes, daily mobility data and mobility indices of road transportation. Individual flight location data and monthly data are used for aviation and maritime transportation sectors estimates. Monthly fuel consumption data is used for estimating the emissions from commercial and residential buildings. The data is down-scaled to city-level (10 km resolution) by converting into gridded map data. The gridded daily emissions data is disaggregated into individual cities using city area boundaries. The city-level transport and residential data is corrected using TomTom congestion data and daily heating degree days.
Documentation of methodology	https://cities.carbonmonitor.org/ and https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01657-z
Data quality/verified by 3rd party	The data has been corrected and validated by removing outliers and comparing the results to existing city inventory data. The overall uncertainty of the data is ±21.7%. The data has been scientifically peer-reviewed.
Alignment with global standards and protocols (eg GPC and CRF )	Not aligned with GPC or CRF
Emissions scopes	Scope 1 only
GHGs	CO2 only
Sectors included	Stationary energy, transport (ground and aviation), IPPU (fossil fuel CO2 emissions only)
Scopes, GHGs and sectors excluded	GHGs: CH4, N2O, HFCs, PFCs, SF6, NF3. Sectors: Waste, AFOLU emissions (up to 10% of global CO2 emissions), and non-fossil fuel CO2 IPPU emissions
Temporal resolution	Near-real-time, daily
Spatial resolution	10 km, but can be aggregated to city boundary
Functionality for city to make adjustments	No functionality for cities to input their own local emissions data or to adjust the city boundary
Latest accounting year	2021
Frequency of data updates	Unknown
Units	Metric kilotonnes (kt CO2)
Using the tool, data outputs and how it can be exported	The data of 50 selected cities is available to download for free from the Carbon Monitor Cities website and the complete dataset of 1,500 cities can be downloaded for free from Figshare. Links to future updates of the complete dataset will be posted on the Carbon Monitor Cities website. The data output is an excel spreadsheet that contains daily emissions data for every city for every sector. Cities need to add the daily emissions data for each sector for their city to get annual total or sectoral emissions. The sectors are not aligned with the GPC or CRF so would need to be mapped against them in order to report the data against these protocols.
Additional tool functionalities	None