Greenhouse Gas Inventory Accounting for Chinese Cities: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

City Greenhouse Gas (GHG) inventory, a framework for measuring a city’s detailed emissions from all activities, provides scientific evidence for the purpose of policy-making. As one of the largest GHG emitters in the world, China aims to reduce CO2 emissions per unit of GDP to 60 to 65 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. However, city GHG inventories in China have not yet been published by the city governments. Furthermore, previous studies on city inventory accounting are neither complete nor globally comparable. Hence, a case study of Beijing was conducted for the purpose of reporting the city inventory completely and enabling data to be comparable internationally. This research quantifies Beijing’s latest emissions based on available data through multiple methods, including Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas emissions inventories (GPC), a method devised by the Japanese Ministry of Environment (Japanese Ministry of Environment, 2010) and a method from recent academic research on CO2 emissions in the Chinese iron and steel industry (Zhao, Y. Q., Li, & Li, 2012). According to these methods, Beijing’s GHG emissions were 373,558,617 t CO2 in 2012. Additionally, comparisons between Beijing and six other mega-cities of Shanghai, Tokyo, New York, Washington D.C., London and Paris show that Beijing’s 2012 GHG emission per capita and per 10,000 CNY GDP ranked the highest. This study creates a timely and relatively complete GHG emission inventory that can be widely applied for comparisons and presents recommendations for city inventory building.