This fact sheet examines how Missouri can use its existing policies and infrastructure to meet its emission standards under the Clean Power Plan while minimizing compliance costs, ensuring reliability, and harnessing economic opportunities. Read about additional analyses in WRI's fact sheet...
WRI’s fact sheet series, How States Can Meet Their Clean Power Plan Targets, examines the ways states can meet or even exceed their standards under the CPP while minimizing compliance costs, ensuring reliability, and harnessing economic opportunities. This post explores these opportunities in Michigan.
As part of the Clean Power Plan, the U.S. EPA requires Michigan to reduce its power sector emissions by 33 percent below 2012 levels by 2030. New analysis shows the state can go even further while...
This fact sheet examines how Michigan can use its existing policies and infrastructure to meet its emission standards under the Clean Power Plan while minimizing compliance costs, ensuring reliability, and harnessing economic opportunities. Read about additional analyses in WRI's fact sheet...
Photo: Joshua Damasio, Flickr
More cities are using the Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories (GPC), an international standard that WRI created for cities to measure and report on their emissions. Already, more than 300 cities – up from about 100 at the end of 2014 – have committed to use the GPC. These cities are home to more than 300 million people and annually emit about 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent – roughly the same as Brazil and Germany’s total annual emissions combined.
Cities are responsible for 70 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. More than half of the world’s people currently live in urban areas, and this is expected to grow to two-thirds by 2050. As such, cities represent the single greatest opportunity for tackling climate change. To take effective action, however, cities need reliable data on their emissions.
WRI partnered with C40 and ICLEI to create the Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories, launched in December 2014. The GPC, which builds on WRI’s flagship Greenhouse Gas Protocol, provides a common standard enabling cities to accurately and comprehensively measure their emissions, set reduction strategies and track their progress.
Starting in 2013, WRI, C40 and ICLEI piloted the GPC in 35 cities and actively engaged organizations to ensure broad adoption. The Compact of Mayors, the carbonn Climate Registry, CDP, the World Bank, UN-HABITAT, the Inter-American Development Bank, the British Standards Institution and many other organizations have now adopted the GPC standard.
The GPC is the first widely endorsed international standard for cities to measure and report their emissions. Using the GPC, cities can assess what strategies are working and hold themselves accountable for results. Better data can also help to drive investment, providing cities improved access to local and international climate financing.
The more than 300 cities worldwide that have joined the Compact of Mayors have committed to measure their emissions using the GPC, develop action plans to reduce emissions and publicly report on their progress. Many have committed to emission reduction targets. If all Compact of Mayors cities commit to a similar level of ambition, they could collectively avoid the emission of 700 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2030 – comparable to removing nearly all passenger cars from U.S. roads. As more cities join the Compact of Mayors and adopt the GPC, the potential impact on curbing climate change will increase.
The technical note describes the methodologies used in the model for estimating collective greenhouse gas impacts of Compact of Mayors cities.
With a pivotal climate summit in Paris just weeks away, a new far-reaching survey by the Pew Research Center shows widespread support for a global agreement to tackle this challenge.
This fact sheet examines how Pennsylvania can use its existing policies and infrastructure to meet its emission standards under the Clean Power Plan while minimizing compliance costs, ensuring reliability, and harnessing economic opportunities. Read about additional analyses in WRI's fact sheet...
This fact sheet examines how Virginia can use its existing policies and infrastructure to meet its emission standards under the Clean Power Plan while minimizing compliance costs, ensuring reliability, and harnessing economic opportunities. Read about additional analyses in WRI's fact sheet...
South Africa’s newly released climate plan pledges to peak national emissions that cause climate change by 2025 and goes further than other countries on adaptation by quantifying what it will cost to adapt to climate change in light of several possible emissions scenarios.
Both the aviation and maritime sectors have a significant role to play in reducing their emissions to help the world stay on a 2 degree C trajectory – with major economic wins ahead if they do.