Towards Cooperation? Urban carbon assessment tools

In the recent past GHG/ Carbon accounting on a city/municipal scale is becoming a key strategic tool for evaluating city sustainability. Carbon footprints are being used as part of sustainability assessment methodologies or as stand-alone assessments in various cities particularly in the developed nations. With the merging of the Global Compact and the Covenant of mayors and the introduction of the International Standard for determining GHG from cities (GPC), many cities are signing up for the 2020/30 mitigation targets. Even when US pulled out of the Paris accord, cities in the US and around the world have increasingly stepped up to uphold it.

Tracing the History

Post the signing of the Framework Convention on Climate Change by over 150 countries at the UN Conference for Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Annex I parties to the convention started ratifying and working on the first national communication (NC1) on climate change policies. The convention came into force in 1994 as countries began submitting the NC1 including a base year (1990) inventory of the Greenhouse Gas emissions and projections to 2000 based on the then draft IPCC methodology. The IPCC subsequently published the revised guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories in 1996 and then 2006.

By 2001 most Non-Annex I parties had also submitted their initial national communication. Between the 2001 and 2006, the standards and tools for Carbon Accounting start to appear and the concept is put into practice at multiple scales from individual to nations, with products, companies and communities in between.

Figure 1

Tracing the development of urban carbon assessment, the first wave was in the early 1990’s when the forerunner organizations ICLEI in US, Climate Alliance and Energie Cities in the UK and EU were formed. The second wave in the early 2000’s saw the introduction of more transnational networks and more geographically diverse and increasing number of cities, emergence of nationally focused networks and private and grassroot initiatives. A third wave can now be identified post the GPC with the merging of the biggest networks into the Global Covenant of Mayors. The evolution of these movements and the eventual development of the Global Protocol for City level Emissions Inventory (GPC) is a complex network of associations and collaborations from 1990 to 2017. Figure 1 maps this landscape to visualize the development of the GPC and currently active organizations and movements in Urban GHG accounting.

The thing to note here is the growing concurrence between the diverse approaches and the drive towards finding a universally applicable tool. While this cooperation may seem like a desirable thing, as multiple organisations come together towards one goal; it can also be detrimental to the goal. As a systems thinker and transitions scholar, I am constantly trying to examine my unconscious biases and one of the things I have come to realise is that our quest for one/THE solution is a result of our reductionist worldviews.

I will illustrate this with an example, have you noticed how trees spread their seeds? Every species has a uniquely developed system and all of them are extremely efficient. The efficiency is not the result of standardization but of the optimal interactions with the environmental and other conditions. As anyone who has used these standardized tools will tell you, every city is different and you need to adapt the framework to the context. How reliable then is the claim to comparisons and benchmarks? One must see these as merely indicative and not absolute descriptors. Multiple approaches also ensure diversity and finding the optimal approach for a context as against force-fitting the context to an approach.

While cooperation is emerging as one of the key ingredients of a transition society, it is essential to keep examining our biases and looking for the deeper worldviews and mental models that are driving the cooperation agendas. There is no one way/one solution/one design... the secret lies instead in the multiplicity arising from diverse interactions.