If one were to begin by saying that India's intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs) on climate change talk about the following targets:

• To reduce the emissions intensity of its GDP by 33 to 35 per cent by 2030 from its 2005 level;
• To create an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent through additional forest and tree cover by 2030.

Well, however much, we try to grasp these figures, they continue to stay as figures only failing to lay the desired impact required for collective action. And if a layman is not made aware of the horrendous future we are heading to, who would then act as drivers of change? 

Another pertinent question here is: what does it mean for a local body representative or a city government for that matter? Do they have the suitable capacities to manage these gases that are being emitted within their own city boundaries? Instead, we should put it this way: we have crossed 400 ppm levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere now, which means, we are all locked in a huge furnace whose minimum temperatures have been permanently set and cannot be changed any further. Would that not sound more understandable and scary in a more necessary way?

If the emission reduction is not made process friendly for its managers, it will persist as a national concern, keeping it far away from trickling down to the lowest level of the governance, where the actual, local action is expected to commence. Unless a complex issue is broken down into simpler and understandable methods with a clearly outlined framework, its gravity remains far from being understood. Same is the case with global issues, such as climate change, rising CO2 emissions, and global warming.

In the era of sustainable development, where the world is increasingly discussing the rise of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, do we ever wonder as to what does it actually mean for us? What could be done to mainstream these actions into formal processes of our governance system? Climatic changes are an inevitable part of our existence; however, what is equally true is that owing to unprecedented human activities, a paradigm shift has taken place and this time the change is fast and furious.

These irreversible changes are occurring so fast that there is a dire need and rightfully so to strengthen suitable mechanisms to document these emissions. The efforts undertaken, internationally, nationally, or at state or district levels to document these emissions, need an overarching framework with a certain degree of standardization. Till then, maintaining the consistency as well as accuracy of the data remains a distant reality. Thus, in such scenarios, only national-level efforts would continue to succeed, which again would dissolve and discourage the local endeavours.

With cities building up and mushrooming at lightning speed, there is an urgent need to be watchful of the emissions these smaller spaces are expected to pump in the atmosphere. More than focussing on larger geographical areas (country level), city-level emission checks are the need of the hour. The city governments, which uphold the strategic power to conceptualize and deliver the changes in the system, need empowerment in terms of mapping their own emissions to further articulate strategies to mitigate them. With this growing uncertainty, we have definitely come to believe that we need a customized yardstick to measure our areas of problem and manage the solutions.

If we look at the published facts worldwide, we would realize that the net emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from human activities increased by 35 per cent from 1990 to 2010 (Source: www.epa.gov). We have surpassed the CO2 concentrations that were present in the atmosphere even 800,000 years ago, including the natural fluctuations. In the United States, the anthropogenic GHG emissions increased by 7 per cent between 1990 and 2014. Unfortunately, with the new government in the States, the situation is becoming even more grim, acting as a deterrent force for all the efforts taken till now. Even in a country such as Australia, emissions from electricity have had the largest growth, dumping 59.5 megatonnes into the atmosphere, an increase of 49.2 per cent between 1990 and 2016 (Source: www.abc.net.au). How often do we hear of equally significant emission reduction news? Given this dismal scenario, what kind of a mitigation action are we aspiring to follow which can help us out of this problem?

Furthermore, when we talk about GHG emissions, there is another underlying assumption that it is CO2 which is the main monster ruling the world and other gases just add a bit to the overall dreadful impact. Gases, such as water vapour, methane, hydrofluorocarbons, nitrous oxide, and ozone, which comprise the GHGs, are equally detrimental in their own ways. Do we have suitable source-apportionment studies done by respective cities to observe and document them?

What gets measured gets managed, and to manage these gases, we need to measure them. A fair amount of success has been achieved in establishing processes and methods to deal with the sector-specific emissions. GHG reporting and inventorization has changed the way we look at emission documentation today. Though the streamlining of these processes is still an evolving practice, what is encouraging to know is that authorities who wish to initiate the documentation and reporting of the emissions, under their own city boundaries, can now do so with these frameworks and continue improving progressively. However, the challenge faced by these methods today is the inability to standardize, due to which there is an inconsistency prevailing in the outcomes, thereby making these results and datasets ambiguous for policy use.

One Size Cannot Fit All

Every country, state, and city is different. What could be made comparable are just the physical parameters, such as size, demographics, geography, type, etc. Though climate change and rising emissions are emerging as global threats and cross-cutting issues today, there is now an increasing need to offer detailed and customized solutions, making them appear more localized, achievable, acceptable, manageable, and effective.

The explicit diversity that lies behind the formation of these global issues is humungous. Let us look at a country such as China. The emissions in China had peaked in 2014 between 9.3 and 9.5 metric tonnes. But China is home to most industries whose products are used worldwide. It is also home to industries that are set up just because certain countries cannot handle the scale of waste produced in their own countries. So, what does a country like China do? Unfortunately, these industries need nothing more but huge parts of 'energy' in addition to other crucial resources, such as water, land, etc. Also, given its high urbanization rate, the emissions are inevitable in the absence of a concrete framework.

Similarly, Japan's largest economic centre, Tokyo, accounts for 62 million tonnes of GHG emissions with energy-related CO2 emissions accounting for about 95 per cent of Tokyo's total GHG emissions. Japan's emissions rose to 1.408 billion metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent from a year earlier, according to the revised data published by the Ministry of Environment. For Japan, till 2011, 26 per cent of electricity generation took place through nuclear plants. However, 48 of their nuclear reactors were shut in 2013 amidst rising safety requirements after the 2011 earthquake and Tsunami. Now, this has resulted in a sharp rise in the emissions.

About-Turn from the Paris Agreement

Recently, President Donald Trump initiated America's exit from the pivotal Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement represented a monumental breakthrough in the climate change negotiation deadlock between developed and developing countries and signalled an international commitment to addressing and mitigating the adverse impacts of climate change. The President's decision to leave the Paris Agreement was made despite a significant opposition from a number of companies, industries, states, and businesses. The repercussions of the USA, the second-largest GHG emitter, leaving this agreement will be serious, yet complicated. The newly formed scepticism around the American Government is piling up the existing stress in this sector. According to an analysis, the American president's concerted efforts to roll back the climate change policies could lead to an extra half a billion tonnes of GHGs pumped in the atmosphere by 2025. In the absence of concerted efforts by other countries, the global mission to curb the emissions is highly vulnerable, even risking a gradual fading out. So, in such a situation, what gains crucial significance is, how we handle the growing GHG emissions amidst such an unexpected exit from one of the largest emitter?

India's Case

For India, in addition to emissions, tackling pollution, too, remains a recurrent challenge. As per what could be gauged from Figure 1, the rising pollution levels are blamed to be a direct effect of fast and uncontrolled urbanization in India. The pollution levels in Delhi was a global news in November 2016 with PM2.5 levels rising to threatening levels. These particulates can have much short-term and irreversible health impacts than the cumulative GHGs.

Different Regions, Different Circumstances

What could be standardized are the approaches that could be adopted broadly by the city or national governments. Growing cities have established an inevitable yet direct correlation with the growing emissions. So the question is: how realistic do we sound when we say, 'cities are the biggest opportunities for climate change mitigation'? What steps need to be taken and by whom, if this situation is envisaged for a change?

Progressive research has now proved that tackling these emissions and growth in economies, both can go hand in hand. In the presence of a strong and robust assessment framework, sustainable urban growth can be made possible. Measuring the emission of existing and future urban growth is thus of paramount significance, when it comes to tackling climate change. For instance, let us take the energy sector. According to an analysis undertaken by the World Resources Institute (WRI) two years back, the energy sector contributes to more than 75 per cent of the global GHG emissions.  This implies that this sector needs attention when it comes to articulating mitigation actions. But, while the energy sector dominates China's emission composition, countries, such as Brazil and Australia have a significant share of emissions from agriculture. Simply put, different countries and cities may have different sectors contributing to the global pool of emissions; however, if the energy sector is known and analysed for its trends over the years, through the available data, more specific strategies could be articulated. Data availability and accessibility can lead to multifold leap in the process of formulating the mitigation strategies, which could be more specific and impactful rather than generic and long term. It is in this context that GHG reporting and calculations can be a vital step towards achieving this goal.

GHG Accounting: Uncertainties and Inconsistencies

If cities are the future, they invariably need to demonstrate strong leadership in emission-reduction process as well as outcomes. However, the concern always has been the inconsistency in measurement frameworks. The level of difference in the format of accounting and reporting makes the collation, analysis, and presentation of the results a tedious task.  The city governments can play a significant role in making the desired change. However, what remains as a persistent challenge is the availability of emissions data (Source: www.wri.org). National inventories had set the tone for this process and many countries in the world were seen adhering to it. Countries such as Australia had set up the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting (NGER) Scheme under the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act, 2007, with a purpose of providing data and accounting in relation to GHG emissions, energy consumption, and production. The Department of the Environment has a formal responsibility for tracking progress against Australia's target under the Kyoto Protocol (Source: www.cleanenergyregulator.gov.au).

Similarly, China's National Action Plan on Climate Change mentions reasonable control of the total coal consumption as limiting coal to a maximum of 4.2 billion tonnes by 2020 (Source: climateactiontracker.org) , as can be seen in Figure 2. Other countries, such as Japan and many others have entered into the process of emission reduction using several available methods.

National reporting programmes have been relatively successful in manifesting the national agendas and progress towards achieving the emission reduction targets; however, some of the subnational mandatory programmes are also seen as encouraging. For instance, California's legislation, which mandates the GHG reporting, is applicable for industrial facilities, fuel suppliers, and electricity importers under the GHG- reporting programme.  Sub-national level of assessments ensure downscaled data collection, based on which highly contextualized strategies can be derived. The sub-national data inventories, that may act as broad guidelines, can be used by the local governments to articulate policies but that may not be sufficient. 

Making the emissions data available along with transparency in the process, can be now made possible with several reporting frameworks. However, data, which acts as an input to this inventory, can be gathered from a variety of sources, such as government departments and statistics agencies, national GHG inventory report, universities, technical articles in environmental books, journals and reports, and sector experts/stakeholder organizations, etc. What remains a challenge is to maintain consistency in both acquiring data as well as storing it. Some frameworks have made attempts to overcome this challenge.

Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories (GPC)

One of the relevant frameworks is the GPC that offers a clear guide that builds on the existing methods of cities to report the emissions from various sources. The framework is an outcome of collaborative efforts between GHG Protocol at WRI, C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40), and Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI). Similarly, climate registry and CDP can also act as a guide for data. 

GPC provides an overarching and sector-specific guidance. The framework allows a fair amount of flexibility for city governments to choose the most suitable methodology depending on their requirements, objectives, and availability of data. Such frameworks can help eliminate the apprehensions associated with the handling of large datasets and while maintaining aspects, such as accuracy, availability, and consistency, but can also act as a guiding tool for managing the existing and future data, which could be well used for similar future assessments.

Thus, with newer cities emerging, managing the gases through various sectors shall no more remain as an option. Through the reporting frameworks, one can introduce a fair amount of discipline and consistency in handling datasets and then using it to frame suitable, city-wide policies. However, it is important to note that while GHG reporting can significantly strengthen the process of handling large, city-wide data, it can also help cities align themselves with the national agendas. This can be a huge leapfrogging in the global efforts, thereby leading to developing sustainable urban development and liveable cities.

Ms Aditi Phansalkar is an architect by graduate training with a Masters in Sustainable Development and Climate Change. She is a passionate enthusiast working in the field of urban sustainability and climate change. In addition to her expertise in policy research and linking climatic changes with urban growth, she is also inclined towards writing research-oriented blogs and has been a regular writer for different forums, such as TerraGreen, Energy Future, First Post, and various other journals.