Just 25 mega-cities produce 52% of the world's urban greenhouse gas emissions

[Jim__]

An image from the paper in Frontiers in Sustainable Cities



And from the article in phys.org

In 2015, 170 countries worldwide adopted the Paris Agreement, with the goal limiting the average global temperature increase to 1.5°C. Following the agreement, many countries and cities proposed targets for greenhouse gas mitigation. However, the UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2020 shows that, without drastic and strict actions to mitigate the climate crisis, we are still heading for a temperature increase of more than 3°C by the end of the 21st century.

A new study published in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Cities presents the first global balance sheet of greenhouse gasses (GHGs) emitted by major cities around the world. The aim was to research and monitor the effectiveness of historical GHG reduction policies implemented by 167 globally distributed cities that are at different developmental stages.

While only covering 2% of the Earth's surface, cities are big contributors to the climate crisis. But current urban GHG mitigation targets are not sufficient to achieve global climate change targets by the end of this century. "Nowadays, more than 50% of the global population resides in cities. Cities are reported to be responsible for more than 70% of GHG emissions, and they share a big responsibility for the decarbonization of the global economy. Current inventory methods used by cities vary globally, making it hard to assess and compare the progress of emission mitigation over time and space," says co-author Dr. Shaoqing Chen, of Sun Yat-sen University, China.

...

First, the authors conducted sector-level GHG emission inventories of the 167 cities—from metropolitan areas such as Durban, South Africa, to cities such as Milan, Italy. Then, they analyzed and compared the carbon reduction progresses of the cities based on the emission inventories recorded in different years (from 2012 to 2016). Lastly, they assessed the cities' short-, mid-, and long-term carbon mitigation goals. The cities were chosen from 53 countries (in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania) and were selected based on representativeness in urban sizes and regional distribution. The degree of development was distinguished based on whether they belonged to developed and developing countries according to the UN classification criteria.

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[Duppers]

1. China! Not surprised here.

[jimfields33]

2. I was expecting us to be pretty bad, but we're pretty good

China is really the country destroying the planet. Unfortunately we can’t do much to stop them.

[exboyfil]

5. Per capita they look no worse than us in the big cities

They have about the same birth rate as us. There is just 4 times as many of them. Total per capita usage is about a third of us.

[OnlinePoker]

3. I can't stand that China is still labelled as a "Developing Country"

They're a first world country with a space station for crying out loud. They are no longer "developing".

[hunter]

4. At least $400 billion dollars worth of China's pollution is our pollution.

It wasn't until recently China realized they were sending the U.S.A. all this good stuff in containers, and we were returning the same containers full of toxic waste to be "recycled."

You really can't be smug about the closing of a coal power plant in your community if you are watching the news on a television made in China in a coal powered factory, and your old television set ended up there to be recycled.