CLMS-Cities: Towards monitoring CO2 emissions on the neighbourhood scale in European cities based on Copernicus data

With the ever-increasing realisation that measures against climate change have to be local, many cities opted to become NetZero (i.e., CO2-Neutral, emissions compensated) in the near future. Especially within the EU, a large-scale project takes place driven in close collaboration between the EU and cities. The “EU Cities Mission” facilitates urban transition via supporting actions and strategies towards neutrality by offering official labelling to cities that create successful climate city contracts and commit to achieve CO2-Neutrality by 2030. The Horizon project CLMS-Cities targets to support cities with quantifying and trenching their CO2 emissions based on existing and freely available Copernicus Services, in particular within CLMS (Copernicus Land Monitoring Service Cities) and in-situ data such as GNSS based mobility data. Within CLMS-Cities a CO2 exchange model for local-scale scope 1 CO2 emissions is developed at 10m resolution at hourly scale for the five sectors: mobility, buildings, industrial sources, AFOLU (Agriculture, Forestry and other land uses), and human respiration following closely typical city inventories. We here present first results and the background of the model for the case study city Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain (Tier 1 city). The model is mainly based on the Urban Atlas and produces estimates of CO2 exchange by integrating relevant Copernicus services, satellite products and third-party mobility data. To ensure robustness, the model is paired with local-scale eddy covariance observations in the city centre of Vitoria-Gasteiz. Following this validation process, the model will be extended and rolled out to ten additional EU Mission cities to ensure that it accommodates a wide range of spatial, urban and environmental contexts, that is seen across the real cities in the EU. A co-design approach underpins this work, with continuous engagement with cities to ensure that their requirements are fully integrated in the design, development and operationalisation of the model.