Ecological and Carbon Footprints of Cities

Population and urbanisation are main contributors of carbon emissions, energy demand, resource consumption, waste generation and climate change. Tackling climate change is the emerging challenge of cities as through the process of obtaining their natural resource needs, they influence their ecological and carbon footprints. Ecological and carbon footprints have become critical indicators for navigating the progress towards reducing Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and climate change. Thus, it is vital that the ecological and carbon footprints data capture the city supply chains comprehensively. In this article, we look at carbon and ecological footprints of cities at different levels and show how city input-output databases fulfill several necessities that allows comparisons of cities and help inform viable decision-making. We also consider input-output data of ecological and carbon footprints required to examine progress of cities towards reducing GHG emissions across whole supply chains to inform evidence-based policy making towards sustainability and climate change policies.