Measuring progress in reducing urban greenhouse gas emissions

Cities have emerged as leaders in US efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but the scientific knowledge to quantitatively track emissions and assess the efficacy of mitigation is lacking. As the global population increasingly resides in urban regions, scientific knowledge about how much, where, and why a particular city emits carbon becomes increasingly important.  The CO2-USA project is a synthesis effort to build a collaborative network to exchange information on community standards and common measurements, facilitate data sharing, and create analysis frameworks and cross-city syntheses to catalyze a new generation of researchers and enable new collaborations tackling important objectives that are difficult to address in isolation. [NOAA Award to Hutyra]

Urban vegetation in Boston.