“Watch a City Aglow in Greenhouse Gas Emissions

• EMILY BADGER
• OCT 09, 2012

The above picture is a snapshot of the city of Indianapolis, as seen through its greenhouse gas emissions. All those glowing green patches of land – those are individual residences contributing to the city’s carbon footprint thanks to home heating, lighting and appliances. The tall red towers illustrate the emissions coming from commercial properties and industry. And those squat red bars cutting through the city – those are cars traveling Indianapolis’ beltway at rush hour, emitting carbon dioxide as they go.

This image comes from the Hestia Project, a software system just developed by researchers at Arizona State University that can estimate greenhouse gas emissions across a city’s landscape, right down to its individual buildings and roadways.

“We all love to point the finger at everyone else for greenhouse gases, but one thing that becomes imminently clear when you look at emissions in this detail is that blame is a ridiculous thing to do,” says Kevin Gurney, an associate professor in ASU’s School of Life Sciences and a senior scientist with the Global Institute of Sustainability. “We’re all part of the system. All of us engage in these activities. I drive a car, I have a home, I go to work. And you really see that.”

The software corrals publicly available data wholly unrelated to climate change. That includes property tax filings that reveal the size and age of buildings, how they’re used and what fuel heats them, DMV records on auto maintenance and inspections, and Metropolitan Planning Organization traffic count estimates. “None of that data has been collected technically for any environmental reason,” Gurney says.

And this is one of the strengths of Hestia. The United States and other nations have objected to international climate treaties that don’t include rigorous verification of emissions levels and reduction efforts. We can’t solve the problem, the argument goes, until we can accurately measure the scope of it and what governments say they’re doing to address it.

Well, Hestia has figured out how to estimate those measurements at the micro scale, using internally consistent data that could hardly be classified as suspect (think cities are manipulating their DMV records to paint a rosier picture of their carbon footprints?). “This is starting to eliminate that excuse,” Gurney says.

Hestia can also track patterns in emissions over time. In this hypnotic hourly animation, you can watch the people of Indianapolis head to work in those red buildings by day, then return home to residences that light up in green with tens of thousands of households turning up their thermostats and TVs by night. Traffic along the city’s main highways ebbs and flows in purple.

This seasonal animation, meanwhile, illustrates how dramatically different a city’s energy use appears in summer and winter.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Image: Hestia

“When It Comes to Cutting Carbon, Cities May Be More Powerful Than National Governments

When it comes to leadership on climate change issues, don’t bother looking to the top. National governments have made little headway in developing plans and policies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Kyoto protocol was the start of an international conversation, but one with a limited impact. The COP 15 Climate Change Conference in 2009 resulted in little, as did its follow-up meetings in 2010 and 2011. Delegates at theRio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development are hoping those talks will continue to develop, but recent history suggests leadership at the national level is far off.

At the local level, though, progress has been made. As we’ve previously reported, cities across the planet are crafting and implementing plans to adapt to and even reduce the impacts of global climate change. And according to a coalition of the world’s largest cities, progress continues. The C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group says its 58 member cities are on a track to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 248 million tons by 2020 – about 0.8 percent of global emissions.

Not a huge bite, but at least its something. C40 notes that many of these city-level efforts have been enacted without the support of national governments.

The Carbon Disclosure Project’s 2012 global cities report [PDF] also asserts that mayors have direct control of over 75 percent of urban emissions sources, from municipal fleets to residential waste management to outdoor lighting to urban planning. This is a pretty striking figure.

And according to the report, city governments are responsible for 77 percent of the actions being taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

So while it might be nice and useful to see some leadership on climate change and greenhouse gas emissions at the national level, down at the city level there is power, funding and inclination to take action.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Photo:   Sergio Moraes / Reuters