Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

In Canada, governments are firmly committed to fighting climate change. Many municipalities are also actively involved in reducing urban greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Reliable and accessible GHG quantification tools are essential to help decision makers follow their progress toward net-zero emissions and measure the efficiency of the different potential mitigation actions. Governments also need tools to educate citizens about their impact on climate, and engage them in making behavioral changes. Municipalities usually rely on GHG emission inventories to measure their progress, but there are a number of limitations associated with the current approach. The lack of spatial and temporal resolutions prevent decision-makers from understanding the impact of the different parameters that influence emissions. GHG emission inventories are also difficult to understand and not attractive for most citizens, so that they cannot really be used for education and mobilization purposes. A research projects in ongoing to develop a high spatial and temporal resolution urban GHG emission inventory to overcome these limitations. However, the scope of municipal GHG emission inventories is mainly limited to direct emissions. Large portions of GHG emissions that people living in a city are responsible for are embedded in products or resources that have little to no direct emissions within the city (e.g. food, construction materials, and many consumer goods). Municipal decision-makers have the power to influence both direct and indirect (life-cycle) GHG emissions through different policies and programs, as well as citizens through decisions they make about what they consume and how they live. Focusing on direct emissions could lead to burden shifting, potentially increasing GHG emissions outside the city limits. Moreover, these inventories present a past situation and are not predictive. Urban GHG emission inventories are therefore limited, and their use alone does not allow identifying the more efficient strategies to reduce both direct and indirect GHG emissions in the future. The purpose of this proposal is to go beyond the improvement of city-level GHG emission inventories obtained by a better spatial and temporal resolution, and to propose a more advanced tool based on dynamic and prospective urban metabolism. It aims to develop a dynamic and prospective map of urban direct and indirect (life-cycle) GHG emissions as a tool for municipalities to develop more efficient and better-targeted climate mitigation actions, and to educate and engage citizens so that they contribute to achieving net-zero emissions. The availability of such a tool would accelerate urban GHG emission reductions as it would help municipal decision makers prioritize climate mitigation actions, and it would increase citizens awareness and willingness to change behaviors and to accept climate mitigation actions implemented by municipalities and other levels of government.