| Abstract: | This paper reports on two efforts to develop methods for quantifying and analysing greenhouse gas emissions from local places. The International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives-Cities for Climate Protection (ICLEI-CCP) campaign and the Association of American Geographers-Global Change in Local Places (AAG-GCLP) project represent independent efforts with differing origins and objectives. There is a rich and dynamic fine structure to the causal patterns that determine the level of greenhouse gas emissions in the society. This fine structure is essentially opaque to national and state-level inventories and analyses, and yet understanding it is necessary to understanding how human communities can be organised and human enterprise structured in environmentally sustainable ways. Simplified inventory methods that account for most but not all emissions, use readily available local data and, most important, inform efforts at emission reduction are currently available for cities and could be made available for larger or more diverse local regions or areas. |
