Accurate accounting and monitoring of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are key to assess our efforts at mitigating climate change. While most countries now routinely report their annual national emissions to the UNFCCC, many important climate policy decisions are made at the finer scale of regional and city governments. A growing number of cities have started developing their own local GHG inventories, but inconsistent methodologies sometimes lead to emission underestimations and hamper our ability to compare emission trends across cities.

High-resolution inventories of GHG emissions over large regions offer a way to standardize emission accounting and monitoring at policy-relevant scales, and are important inputs into the top-down inverse modeling of emissions using sensor measurements. In addition, scalable high-resolution inventories provide a tool to track emissions and prioritize mitigation policies to cities and local governments without the resources to construct their own inventories from scratch.

In this session, researchers and practitioners constructing and using high-resolution spatial inventories of GHG emissions will exchange their findings and discuss key challenges such as the validation of their results. The session will include research on territorial GHG accounting as well as consumption-based accounting, and cover the latest methods for GHG emission spatial desegregation and bottom-up accounting, as well as for uncertainty quantification and data validation. To complement the methodological talks, we will invite contributions by practitioners using high-resolution GHG inventories to inform climate policy and local scales. With such a mix of contributions by inventory developers and users, the session will provide participants with rich opportunities for knowledge exchange and establishment of novel partnerships.