Estimating CO<sub>2</sub> emissions for 108 000 European cities

Abstract

Abstract. City-level CO2 emissions inventories are foundational for supporting the EU's decarbonization goals. Inventories are essential for priority setting and for estimating impacts from the decarbonization transition. Here we present a new CO2 emissions inventory for all 116 572 municipal and local-government units in Europe, containing 108 000 cities at the smallest scale used. The inventory spatially disaggregates the national reported emissions, using nine spatialization methods to distribute the 167 line items detailed in the National Inventory Reports (NIRs) using the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) Common Reporting Framework (CRF). The novel contribution of this model is that results are provided per administrative jurisdiction at multiple administrative levels, following the region boundaries defined OpenStreetMap, using a new spatialization approach. All data from this study are available on Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5482480 (Moran, 2021) and via an interactive map at https://openghgmap.net (last access: 7 February 2022​​​​​​​).