Grant: Alliance Grants

Municipal governments control half of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions, and over 400 Canadian municipalities have committed to reducing emissions. Policy decisions are based on "bottom-up" inventories generated through accounting mechanisms, and while inventories contain crucial sectorial information, they cannot account for emissions that are unknown or inadvertent. "Top-down" emissions are derived from atmospheric measurements and are key for validating inventories and quantifying total emissions reductions. Together, bottom-up and top-down quantification provides the most powerful policy-relevant information.To demonstrate that we have achieved net-zero emissions by 2050, we must quantify urban emissions of methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2) today and monitor their reductions over time, while identifying the policies that have made the most significant impacts. The Toronto Atmospheric Monitoring of Emissions (TAME) project will equip the Greater Toronto Area with atmospheric observatories to quantify emissions, validate and refine inventories, and provide timely information to governments to implement and verify the effects of emissions policies. This will be accomplished by measuring atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases (CO2 and CH4) themselves together with other tracers that serve as proxies for the sources of those emissions or emissions reductions. These tracers will include fluorinated compounds used in air source heat pumps that are themselves potent greenhouse gases, products of combustion and criteria air pollutants carbon monoxide (CO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and urban vegetation sequestration information from greenness indices and solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence measurements.We will engage with local, provincial, and federal agencies and community partners to ground our studies in local practices and connect them to policymakers.