ICT-ENSURE Information System on Literature in the Field of ICT for Environmental Sustainability

This paper describes a methodology to account and attribute greenhouse gas emissions on a
regional level. Regional greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories support the development and
monitoring of climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies and policies for municipalities
and cities. However, information and scientific expertise on climate change impacts are complex
and a consensual and consistent methodology on formation of regional GHG inventories is still
missing. Available methodologies and calculation tools mostly fail to balance scientific adequacy
and usability from a pragmatic perspective. Within the project Regional Carbon Footprint (RCF),
software that allows data management (i.e. for bottom up data) in order to calculate regional
greenhouse gas inventories and to report about regional carbon footprints has been developed.
Efforts needed for data collection turned out to be the main bottleneck for application from a
practitioner's point of view. The RCF approach overcomes these shortcomings by closing this gap
with the use of top down data taken from statistics.