Developing a historical energy and GHG emission inventory for the New York City Metro area

Despite the vital importance of 21st Century urbanization, energy use and GHG emissions trends our understanding of the relationship between these variables is poor. Addressing these research lacunae is crucial for the success of policies, inter alia, to limit GHG emissions, as per the Paris Agreement (2015). Two reasons for the limited understanding of the relationships between urbanization, energy use and GHG emissions is the lack of longitudinal studies (longer than 10 years) and the limited spatial treatment of cities. Most research on urban GHGs is at a specific point in time and covers urban areas as single units. There are a number of studies performed at the individual city or metropolitan level at specific points in time. Exceptions to the first limitation include the Gurney, et al (2009) team that have developed the high resolution Vulcan dataset (now Hestia) that identifies emissions at high resolution (10 km) and has examined GHG emissions at the country level and studies from California, such as those in Los Angeles that examined GHG emissions at the census block level (Pincetl et al, 2015) and the Bay area (Jones and Kammen, 2014). All of these research teams, however, examined emissions at a single point in time or have not provided historical trends. To address these challenges we present a preliminary framework to develop a historical spatially disaggregated inventory of energy use and GHG emissions for selected sources at the county or finer scale for the New York City Metropolitan (31 county) region. The high-resolution and historical inventory could be provided as far back as 30 years. We describe the data and methods used and both the potential and limitations of these inventories.