Tool: Data Portal for Cities

Data Portal for Cities is an open data platform, hosted by the Global Covenant of Mayors in collaboration with WRI, that provides activity data and emission factors to enable cities to calculate their GHG inventory. It aims to help cities fill critical information gaps by providing estimates of previously unavailable data drawn from national and regional sources.

Specifications

Suitable for which city climate journey stage?	Establishing an emissions baseline
Tool strengths	- Aligned with the GPC, CRF and the CIRIS tool - Publicly available methodology documentation - Data can be exported via an API
Tool limitations	- The most recent data is from 2017 and for some countries 2015 - Data not currently updated - Data available for selected countries only and no coverage in Africa or the Middle East
Geographic location/countries	Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Philippines, United States
Language	English, French, Portuguese
Accessibility	Free to use
Methodology	Data Portal for Cities downscales activity data from national and regional data and provides emission factors to convert into emissions data. The local government-scale data is estimated using a combination of existing national and regional statistics, scaling factors, and city-specific data – such as population, building stock data or business patterns. Emission factors used vary from country to country – see country-specific methodologies for more detail. The limitations of the methodology vary from country to country and are well documented. See the Data Methodology & Documentation section on the website (https://dataportalforcities.org/) for more details of country-specific methodologies.
Documentation of methodology	Data Methodology & Documentation section on the Data Portal for Cities website: https://dataportalforcities.org/
Data quality/verified by 3rd party	Quality control assessments conducted for individual countries. See methodology for more information.
Alignment with global standards and protocols (eg GPC and CRF )	Aligned with the GPC and CRF
Emissions scopes	1, 2
GHGs	CO2, CH4, N2O
Sectors included	Stationary energy, transport, waste
Scopes, GHGs and sectors excluded	Scope 3, AFOLU and IPPU (these sectors will be available soon)
Temporal resolution	Annual
Spatial resolution	City boundary
Functionality for city to make adjustments	No functionality within the platform
Latest accounting year	Varies depending on country – 2015 to 2017. There are plans to integrate GoogleEIE data into future versions of this tool which will result in more recent data becoming available.
Frequency of data updates	Unknown
Units	Metric tonnes (t CO2e)
Using the tool, data outputs and how it can be exported	Data Portal for Cities is a map-based online data platform. The user can navigate to a city and download the data as an excel file. Activity data and emission factors for the city can be downloaded as a full dataset or in the ClearPath format, or the total and sector-based emissions data can be downloaded in the CRF format. The tool also has an API functionality to download the data in bulk. Data Portal for Cities data can be imported into the latest version of CIRIS (v2.5) to rapidly create an inventory.
Additional tool functionalities	Data Portal for Cities allows easy comparisons of emission data with other cities. It can also help users see which sectors should be prioritized when choosing decarbonization actions and for investing in better activity data.