Measuring What Matters: Why European Cities Need Bottom-Up Consumption-Based Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories

Joana Bastos; Fabio Monforti-Ferrario

doi:10.55845/jos-2026-22210

Authors

Joana Bastos European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Ispra, Italy https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4711-9522
Fabio Monforti-Ferrario European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Brussels, Belgium https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3272-2684

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.55845/jos-2026-22210

Keywords:

Climate Change, Greenhouse Gas (GHG), Local Climate Action, Cities, Consumption-Based Emissions

Abstract

The EU has actively invested in climate change mitigation in recent decades, successfully reducing territorial greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, consumption-based emissions have been largely overlooked. In particular, local climate action has excluded significant upstream emissions associated with urban activities occurring beyond municipal borders. Current city-level GHG accounting frameworks and practices in the EU typically exclude scope 3 emissions, but these often dominate cities’ GHG footprints. Cities need consumption-based GHG accounting frameworks to support ambitious and effective local climate action. Existing methods to increase the comprehensiveness of city-level GHG accounting include top-down input-output approaches and bottom-up process-based life-cycle approaches. Top-down methods have limited local actionability: they are unable to effectively inform and monitor local climate action because they lack the context-specific connection with physical flows and tangible urban activities that can be shaped by local action. On the other hand, bottom-up methods have been considered impractical due to their high data and modelling requirements. Cities need bottom-up methods and representative data that can be widely applicable to develop comprehensive and actionable consumption-based GHG emission inventories.

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