With the Race to Zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 of the worldwide community, there is an urgent need to define effective and timely protocols to objectively monitor and report the net emissions at the national and subnational level. In this framework, urban areas are going to play a key role, since they host about 50% of the human population and drive the global production and consumption, with an increasing outlook over the next decades. The CarbonCity proposal is aimed at developing and demonstrating the application of an accurate, reliable, affordable prototype observing system, which is able to continuously monitor the net CO2 emissions at city-scale with near-real-time update and long-term stability.
In CarbonCity we will first define the requirements in terms of observing system accuracy and precision to detect trends of city-scale CO2 net emission of the order of those expected with Race to Zero in 2050.