Faced with the growing threat of climate change, cities urgently need to craft effective mitigation and adaptation policies. Cities need data on greenhouse gas emission sources and critical climate hazards to create these policies, but collecting and analyzing the necessary data can be difficult and expensive. The resulting data gaps stall many urban climate-action efforts at the earliest stages, which can have dire consequences for cities going forward.

The Data Portal for Cities provides cities with critical activity, emissions and climate data, down-scaled from global, national and regional sources. Cities can use this down-scaled data to identify effective emission reduction and climate adaptation actions. This data also allows cities to prioritize areas for more detailed local data-gathering. With this information, local governments can build effective climate action plans.

The Data Portal for Cities provides energy consumption and waste production data for nearly every municipality in 12 countries —approximately 60,000 cities. The portal also highlights the emission factors necessary to estimate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in alignment with the GHG Protocol for Cities. The data are available as visualizations, tables formatted for ClearPath or CIRIS and through an API. The data are estimated from national and regional statistics, scaling factors and city-specific contextual data such as population, building stock data and business patterns.

The Data Portal for Cities is currently piloting the addition of local climate-hazard risk and exposure data. With just a few clicks, a local stakeholder anywhere in the world will be able to identify a city’s most important climate hazards — in the present and in the future — and potential actions for reducing risk or negative impacts. Data outputs will also be aligned with the Common Reporting Framework of the Global Covenant of Mayors.