Visualisation of projections
Last updated
Last updated
The second key feature of the Climate Action Decision Support Tool is to provide visualisations of projections of city-level emissions. This feature helps cities to track and project the achievement of their climate neutrality goals and emissions targets in different scenarios and course of actions. The emissions are divided to sectors and sub-sectors based on the GPC protocol.
The tool visualises different scenarios such as the target emissions scenario, baseline scenario and a tailored scenario. The visualisation of the scenarios helps to assess if the city is achieving its emissions targets.
Target emission scenario is build based on each city’s climate neutrality targets and derived from the local plans and strategies.
Baseline scenario projects emissions if no further climate actions are implemented i.e., all the future actions are turned off in the tool.
Tailored scenario allows users to turn on and off various climate actions and see how the overall emission projection changes and whether targets are reached. This feature allows cities to estimate importance and volume of individual actions.
Each of the scenarios is based on the input data chosen by the city. The data is always in a yearly time trend form and mostly broken down to activity and emissions intensity data (e.g., Energy consumption and energy production emission factor). The new features in the tool include more possibilities for using further data to analyse actions and calculate the emission factor or activity data. This could be used for example to calculate the emission factor of a certain vehicle per km using fuel consumption per km and fuel emission factor. Since the activity and emission intensity data is input by the city, it is up to the administrators (normally climate experts) to decide what is included in the baseline scenario.
Target emission scenario and tailored scenarios are created by including the impact of climate action in the activity or emission intensity data. Figure 7 is an example of how the LED lighting investments are estimated to impact electricity consumption. The impact is determined either by data inserted by administrators or calculated in the action impact module developed in Climate-4-CAST. In this case, the city estimated that the LED investments will reduce electricity consumption by 1,05 GWh each year from 2021 to 2025 resulting in the action impact seen in the picture as area shaded with green. Together with the actions in the selected scenario, the selected scenario consumption is seen as a green line, whereas the baseline is seen in a black dashed line. Thus, the tool visualises the impact on electricity consumption.
The tool uses the electricity emissions factor to determine the emissions impact of the action on each given year and reveals the impact on the target year (can be adjusted by tool user) as well as total sum of avoided emissions from action implementation to target year. The results for the LED lights in the example above can be seen in figure 8 below.
The impact of a particular action can be different in different scenarios. In the LED lights example the result will change in case the scenario includes another action that impacts the emissions intensity of electricity production before or at the same time. Also, the impact is different in different years of the time trend if the emission intensity of electricity changes..
In the tool view users can drill down into the details of the sectors and subsectors to learn more about their details and formation. The users can also adjust the view by selecting another scenario or expanding or shortening the visible timeline. These adjustments affect all graphs in the tool.
The Emissions inventory data is collected based on the GPC protocol. Based on the information exchange during the co-development process it is assumed that most cities are familiar with preparing city level emissions inventories and have already structures and processes for the data collection. There for the partners don’t see that the cities face problems in providing data for the emissions inventories.
The challenge could be with projecting the data to the future. The tool requires a yearly time trend of each activity and emission intensity number used for calculating the emissions inventory. It could be that these projections don’t exist and need to be created. Also, the projections need to be done for each sector in the GPC protocol and the availability of this kind of speculative information depends on the city and country. However, it is possible for the cities to start building projections for only the most crucial sectors and expand their inventories later.
