An Assessment of Local Climate Actions on City-Level Greenhouse Gas Emissions

• In Event: Climate Politics from Top to Bottom

Abstract

Despite their individually small scales and limited geographic reach, local governments are widely regarded as having an important role in efforts to mitigate global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In many countries, cities have acted as leaders in climate policy, garnering significant attention from researchers and practitioners. However, a major and on-going obstacle to the advancement of knowledge around local climate efforts has been the inability to systematically link municipal commitments, plans, and actions to actual outcomes. Measurement inconsistencies and data collection challenges obstruct the assembly of relevant outcome metrics that are comparable across a large number of cities. This, in turn, hinders the ability to make generalizable statements about the impact of local climate initiatives and the factors that contribute to or impede their success.

This research takes a significant step towards filling this gap by generating changes in city-level estimates of CO2 emissions. Specifically, we utilize data from Vulcan 3.0, a dataset from the Oak Ridge National Lab, which provides annual estimates of fossil fuel-based CO2 (FFCO2) emissions in the United States at a resolution of one square kilometer (Gurney et al 2019). Using TIGER shapefiles of city boundaries and zonal analysis, we aggregate these emissions estimates to the city level.

We use these newly generated outcome measures to examine the impact that grants from the Department of Energy, distributed as part of the 2009 American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA), had on emissions five years later. We focus specifically on the approximately $3 billion provided to 5,746 US local governments for purposes of energy conservation and efficiency and estimate the extent to which the use of these funds contributed to reductions in local GHG emissions over the next 5 years. A second analysis examines whether local contextual factors—including the community’s political leaning, form of government, and the presence of pre-developed GHG inventories and local climate action plans—systematically mediated the impact of the DOE funds on emissions.

As climate protection increases in urgency, it is likely that the federal government will continue to provide large amounts of funding to local governments to advance the related aims of clean energy, energy conservation, and efficiency. Many funding mechanisms allow municipalities the flexibility to use these funds at their discretion to meet local needs, as long as they are in line with these broad aims. This research is the first to, on a large scale, tie policy actions with local GHG emission outcomes. In so doing, it can help both levels of governments better target their resources.

Authors

• Rachel M. Krause, University of Kansas

• Angela YS Park, Kansas State University

• Christopher Hawkins, University of Central Florida