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Carbon Footprinting of Cities and Implications for Analysis of Urban Material and Energy Flows
Anu Ramaswami, Abel Chavez, and Marian Chertow

As we struggle to get our collective arms around the transportation fuels used by homes, businesses, and indusconcept of urban sustainability, various ways of under- tries within the city and computed associated GHG emisstanding material and energy ows associated with cities sions. Since most cities import some share of their electrichave emerged in the literature. Of course, this is not ity, the embodied GHGs in electric power generation were new. Historians have noted that, one hundred years intuitively recognized early on. However, cities realized that ago New York City was dealing with streets covered the issue of imports also extended to other infrastructures. Many cities were using wastewater treatment with horse manure and coal ash. In Europe, concerns about supplying Integrating learning from the services provided by a central plant located beyond their boundary in the larger urban region. materials to cities were discussed in the early 1900s, and continued (after GHG accounting and MFA The same issues arose with airline travel, where a hiatus) into the late twentieth communities is essential to ad- jet fuel is used by large airports serving several century from a new perspective of vance our understanding of ur- surrounding cities. Furthermore, water in many cities is pumped over long distances, requiring environmental impact, leading to the energy outside the city boundary to provide this development of methods for ban sustainability. very basic necessity. This observation in turn economy-wide material ow analysis (MFA) and their application to cities (Barles 2010). This prompted questions about food, fossil fuels, and other basic mamethod, used in many current studies of urban metabolism, terials such as concrete needed for constructing the urban built allows for tracking of material inputs, changes in stock, export environment. Thus, as the process of GHG accounting evolved, of goods, and release of waste and pollution; indirect material cities focused on energy initially and then began incorporating requirements to support these ows can also be computed. the impact of materials use, while in the MFA community, the While the MFA methodology also draws on energy analysis reverse occurred. Cities began engaging with researchers to examine ows and is considered to be readily adaptable to include energy, in practice there is wide variation in the inclusion of embodied of energy plus water and other essential goods and services that meet basic needs of water, energy, food, shelter, energy components. At the start of the 21st century, concerns about climate and mobility for the community as a whole (Ramaswami change prompted several U.S. cities to adopt the U.S. Mayors et al. 2008). Many of these are related to infrastructure Climate Protection Agreement,1 and cities began implement- provision and are also critical for the economic productiving community-wide urban energy studies in a bottom-up man- ity of cities, and result in what is now represented as a ner for greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting (Bailey 2007).2 May- community-wide infrastructure footprint for cities (Chavez and ors in the European Union (EU) adopted similar covenants by Ramaswami 2012). This infrastructure footprint accounts for 2011.3 Through organizations such as ICLEI,4 such city-scale GHGs from direct energy use by homes, businesses, and indusGHG accounting efforts spread worldwide, including to cities tries within a city, plus the embodied energy and GHGs associated with providing key infrastructureselectricity; fuel; water; in the developing world. In the early years, cities took a boundary-limited view, food; building materials; airline, commuter, and freight travel; tracking community-wide use of electricity, natural gas, and and waste managementto the community as a whole (see gure 1); the method has the advantage that it helps avoid double counting with in-boundary GHGs. 2012 by Yale University DOI: 10.1111/j.1530-9290.2012.00569.x During these discussions, questions arose about all the other stuff used in society, not accounted for above as part of Volume 16, Number 6

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Figure 1 Schematic showing the ows included, the scale emphasized, and the relationships between urban material and energy ows, community-wide infrastructure footprints, and consumption-based footprints developed for reporting the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of cities. Aggregate EIO-LCA refers to economic input-output life cycle assessment, reecting the average production efciency of goods and services in the global economy.

infrastructure. What about furniture, backpacks, and other consumer goods? This created a dilemma. Should the furnitures GHG impact be assigned to the consumer in city A, or to city B where energy used in its industrialcommercial production is accounted in the infrastructure footprint? A focus on households emerged and urban consumptionbased footprints were developed to describe the global GHG impact of all goods and services purchased by a citys households.5 Some researchers are exploring using downscaled input-output (IO) tables that will help identify to what extent local businesses (e.g., grocer, dry cleaner, movie theater, and any factories within the city) serve local householdsthis could help reveal the extent to which local business efciencies translate to reduced consumption footprints. The downscaling of IO tables, however, has so far been quite challenging; new methods to develop high-quality local IO data are essential to understand local material and energy ows both in the context of households and future business development strategies in the city. As an alternative, consumption-based footprinting employs the more familiar approach of combining household consumer expenditure surveys with a life cycle assessment describing the production of goods and services in the larger global/national economy. Consequently some local specicity is lost because, while local improvements in household energy use and personal mobility are captured, local improvements in production to serve local consumption are lost within the average production of the global economy. Further, local businesses serving visitors or producing goods for export would also not be visible in a local consumption account. Despite some loss of local specicity, many cities seek to report consumption-based footprints to educate households about

their global impacts, while the infrastructure footprint informs local and regional infrastructure planning for all local homes, businesses, and industries. Cities and urban researchers realize that a community-wide infrastructure footprint and a separate consumption-based footprint enable complementary views of a city as producer and consumer, respectively (e.g., Baynes et al. 2011). The dual view of cities offered by the two different footprints is being standardized in GHG accounting protocols developed by ICLEI-USA6 (in the United States) and the British Standards Institute7 (United Kingdom). Integrating the discourse that occurred during GHG footprint development can help inform discussions around what trans-boundary and embodied components to include in models of coupled material and energy ows in urban systems that seek to address sustainability. This can also further our understanding of the metabolism of cities. This discourse raises three overarching questions: First, what ows best describe the environmental impacts of cities? Clearly, direct ows arising from the use of energy, water, and materials within city boundaries are important because they are inuenced locally. Inclusion of trans-boundary ows in the form of resource footprints (water, energy, and materials) not only informs understanding of the broader environmental impact of cities, but experience with GHG footprints shows that it also stimulates additional innovative strategies across spatial scale to promote GHG mitigationfor example, supply chain substitutions (e.g., y-ash concrete), service substitutions (e.g., airline travel with telepresence), changes in consumption (e.g., healthy diets campaigns), and improvements in the larger transboundary infrastructures (e.g., commuter or freight rail). Direct plus indirect material accounting in MFA is likewise useful to

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describe the global impact of local recycling efforts. For intimately connected resources such as water and energy, inclusion of the embodied energy in water ows and the water embodied in energy ows is particularly important to address the water energy nexus. However, even if we could account for all direct and indirect ows of water, energy, and materials to cities, what would we do with all that information? Discussions among the GHG accounting community (gure 1) offer useful guidance on aggregating ows into different footprints that represent cities from infrastructure and consumption perspectives, each with distinct policy levers. Methods are also emerging to classify cities as net producers, net consumers, and trade-balanced, based on energy embodied in exports and imports (Chavez and Ramaswami 2012). Connecting such a typology with MFA can be very useful because the large material stock accumulation in cities inadvertently results in their portrayal as unsustainable parasites that do not produce anything useful (Barles 2010). Combining a materials plus energy/economic view of cities enables their environmental impact to be reported in a more nuanced manner reecting the diverse and vibrant functions that cities play in the world. What ows are important to address scarcity? For material resources, high-quality local data on direct urban material inows and outows can help development of precise estimates of stocks important to address scarcity and supply chain concerns. For fossil fuels that often do not have signicant storage within the city, the trans-boundary view offered by community-wide infrastructure footprints will be more important. The case of water is likely mixed. Both water storage within the city (e.g., as groundwater) as well as trans-boundary water ows embodied in various material and energy carriers (fuel, food, electricity, and their own storage outside the city boundary) are likely to be important. In sum, both the diversity of cities and the diverse nature of resources serving cities are important considerations in the analysis of urban material-energy ows. Integrating learning from the carbon accounting and MFA communities is essential to advance urban sustainability.

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GHG emissions represent the global warming potential of the combined emissions of CO2 , CH4 , N2 O and three groups of uorinated gases cited in the Kyoto protocol. Community-wide GHG mitigation targets for EU cities that exceeded national targets were formally adopted in 2011. See http://ec.europa.eu/environment/ecoap/about-eco-innovation/ policies-matters/eu/371_en.htm. ICLEILocal Governments for Sustainability is an international association of cities and local governments that promotes local action for global sustainability. ICLEI-USA is the U.S. afliate. Households dominate nal consumption, which includes household, government, and business capital expenditures. Business capital does not address the energy and materials used in business operations. See http://www.icleiusa.org/tools/ghg-protocol/communityprotocol/us-community-protocol-for-accounting-and-reporting-ofgreenhouse-gas-emissions. See https://ecommittees.bsi-global.com/bsi/controller?livelink DataID=51931145.

References
Bailey, J. 2007. Lessons from the pioneers: Tracking global warming at the local level. Minneapolis, MN, USA: Institute for Local SelfReliance. Barles, S. 2010. Society, energy and materials: The contribution of urban metabolism studies to sustainable urban development issues. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 53(4): 439455. Baynes, T., M. Lenzen, J. K. Steinberger, and X. Bai. 2011. Comparison of household consumption and regional production approaches to assess urban energy use and implication for policy. Energy Policy 39(11): 72987309. Chavez, A. and A. Ramaswami. 2012. Articulating a community-wide infrastructure-based supply chain carbon emissions footprint for cities: Mathematical relationships and policy relevance. Energy Policy, in press. Ramaswami, A., T. Hillman, B. Janson, M. Reiner, and G. Thomas. 2008. A demand-centered, hybrid life-cycle methodology for cityscale greenhouse gas inventories. Environmental Science & Technology 42(17): 64556461.

Acknowledgements
A research coordination network grant (RCN SEES 1140384) from the U.S. National Science Foundation facilitated the synthesis of research insights in this column.

About the Authors

Anu Ramaswami is the Charles Denny Chair Professor of Science, Technology and Public Policy at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. Abel Chavez is a postdoctoral associate at the Center for Sustainable Infrastructure Systems, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, Colorado, USA. Marian Chertow is an associate professor at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.

Notes
1. See http://www.usmayors.org/climateprotection/agreement.htm. 2. Carbon footprint in the title of this column is used as a short-form for GHG emission footprints to communicate with broad audiences.

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