LONDON

Population: 8,300,000 (2012)
Current emissions: 44.4 M tCO2e (2012)
Per capita emissions: 5.3 tCO2e/person (2012)
Reduction Target: 80% below 1990 levels (45.05M t) by 2050, reduce emissions by 20% in 2016 and 60% in 2025 from 1990 levels

Winner of two of C40 Cities’s climate leadership awards for 2014, the City of London has developed and implemented climate action programs that are setting an example for other large cities worldwide.

The City has been producing annual GHG inventories since 2004, and has taken this a step further by including both its direct and indirect emissions. To clarify and streamline their approach to this, they employed PAS 2070, which provides a consistent and transparent quantification, attribution, and reporting framework for tracking these emissions. This builds upon both C40 and Global Protocol for Community-scale GHG emissions, incorporating a wider range of indirect emissions including those from both production and consumption of goods and services. Emissions from goods and services consumed by residents in the City and emissions from aviation are included in this new inventory. The GLA shared the results publicly on their Open Data platform as well as through a published case study. Reviews of their 2010 inventory using this methodology accounted an additional 70 million tons of CO2e to the 44 million that were reported using conventional methods, allowing the city to consider strategies for emissions reductions that would otherwise not have been considered.

The GLA was also hailed for improvements to air quality by C40, for its New Taxi for London project. Part of the Mayor’s 2010 Air Quality Strategy, the project seeks to reduce toxic emissions particularly from its central core by requiring vehicles to be either zero or ultra low emission, starting with its taxi fleet. The project has: commissioned the development of zero emission capable vehicles to suit its needs, employed GPS geofencing to switch off emissions modes of hybrid vehicles in the core Ultra Low Emission Zone, mandated all taxis to be zero emission capable from 2018 and all central London vehicles by 2020, and put forward a financing solution which combines government grants and loans to accelerate uptake of new taxi vehicles.

Recognizing that energy supply was a primary cause of climate change, London set a target to enable 25% of its supply to be moved to local decentralized systems by 2025, and 50% by 2050. Efforts to reduce emissions from buildings include the promotion of alternative energy systems, increase efficiency of existing and new housing stock, as well as a behaviour change campaign. One effort to further this is Re:Connect, a program which specifies ten low carbon zones in London which each signed up to reduce their emissions by 20% in 2012 through self administered community engagement around energy efficiency and supply programs within their boundaries, and which instigated the retrofitting of over 4,000 homes, reducing emissions by 12,600 tonnes of CO2e.

Information from www.london.gov.uk, and from here.