Data Scaling: Implications for Climate Action and Governance in the UK

Local actors have growing prominence in climate governance but key capacities and powers remain with national policymakers. Coordination between national and local climate action is therefore of increasing importance. Underappreciated in existing academic and policy literature, coordination between actors at different scales can be affected not only by politics and institutional arrangements, but also by methods of data analysis. Exploring two datasets of GHG emissions by local area in England—one of consumption-based emissions and the other of territorial emissions—this paper shows the potential for a data scaling problem known as the modifiable areal unit problem and its possible consequences for the efficacy and equity implications of climate action. While this analysis is conceptual and does not identify specific instances of the modifiable areal unit problem or its consequences, it calls attention to methods of data analysis as possible contributors to climate governance challenges. Among other areas, future analysis is needed to explore how data scaling and other aspects of data processing and analysis may affect our understanding of non-state actors’ contribution to climate action

Using crowdsourced data to estimate the carbon footprints of global cities

Cities are at the forefront of the battle against climate change. However, intercity comparisons and responsibility allocations among cities are hindered because cost- and time-effective methods to calculate the carbon footprints of global cities have yet to be developed. Here, we establish a hybrid method integrating top-down input–output analysis and bottom-up crowdsourced data to estimate the carbon footprints of global cities. Using city purchasing power as the main predictor of the carbon footprint, we estimate the carbon footprints of 465 global cities in 2020. Those cities comprise 10% of the global population but account for 18% of the global carbon emissions showing a significant concentration of carbon emissions. The Gini coefficients are applied to show that global carbon inequality is less than income inequality. In addition, the increased carbon emissions that come from high consumption lifestyles offset the carbon reduction by efficiency gains that could result from compact city design and large city scale. Large climate benefits could be obtained by achieving a low-carbon transition in a small number of global cities, emphasizing the need for leadership from globally important urban centres

Using crowdsourced data to estimate the carbon footprints of global cities

Cities are at the forefront of the battle against climate change. However, intercity comparisons and responsibility allocations among cities are hindered because cost- and time-effective methods to calculate the carbon footprints of global cities have yet to be developed. Here, we establish a hybrid method integrating top-down input–output analysis and bottom-up crowdsourced data to estimate the carbon footprints of global cities. Using city purchasing power as the main predictor of the carbon footprint, we estimate the carbon footprints of 465 global cities in 2020. Those cities comprise 10% of the global population but account for 18% of the global carbon emissions showing a significant concentration of carbon emissions. The Gini coefficients are applied to show that global carbon inequality is less than income inequality. In addition, the increased carbon emissions that come from high consumption lifestyles offset the carbon reduction by efficiency gains that could result from compact city design and large city scale. Large climate benefits could be obtained by achieving a low-carbon transition in a small number of global cities, emphasizing the need for leadership from globally important urban centres

Pluralizing the urban waste economy: insights from community-based enterprises in Ahmedabad (India) and Kampala (Uganda)

The delivery of urban basic infrastructure services is often guided by the modern infrastructure ideal, which aims for technical innovation, economic efficiency and uniformity through long-term, centralized management approaches. In rapidly growing urban centres of the global South, however, heterogeneous infrastructure configurations have long involved multiple systems in varying degrees of coexistence. This paper explores how community-based enterprises – organizations that aim not to turn a profit but rather to generate human well-being – contribute to, complement or conflict with wider municipal solid waste management strategies. It does so through two case studies, focused on Luchacos, a local enterprise turning waste into briquettes in an informal settlement of Kampala, Uganda; and the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), a cooperative of waste pickers in Ahmedabad, India. Drawing on empirical data and policy analysis, the research finds that, given the necessary state support, community-based enterprises can contribute to a range of sustainability and development objectives.Urban Development ManagementManagement in the Built Environmen

Climate policy as social policy? A comprehensive assessment of the economic impact of climate action in the UK

Co-benefits are central to the case for climate action but are side-lined in many economic analyses. This paper presents an evaluation of three dimensions of the costs and benefits of climate change interventions in six urban regions of the UK. Findings indicate that meeting the UK’s 2033–2037 climate targets could yield £164 billion in total benefits. Notably, only 13% of these benefits are financial, in contrast to the 79% of which are social benefits. These social benefits include improvements in public health, reduced traffic congestion, and increased thermal comfort in homes. These results underscore the need for economic evaluations to expand their scope and move beyond the narrow financial cost–benefit analysis that predominates. Moreover, the magnitude of the social benefits underscores the need for integrating social and climate challenges in policymaking. Concurrently, the results demonstrate the sensitivity of the social benefits of climate actions to the normative aspects of empirical analysis. Determining whether emissions reductions in the transport sector, for example, should be achieved through the deployment of electric cars, expansion of public transport, and/or increases in walking and cycling requires both technical analysis and value-based decision making. Ensuring that decision-making processes are deliberate and transparent in empirical analysis is therefore critical. We conclude by suggesting that institutions such as the UK Climate Change Committee and Scottish Climate Intelligence Service should take the opportunity to be more explicit in the normative decisions embedded in their empirical work to demonstrate best practice for the wider research community.</p

The selection landscape and genetic legacy of ancient Eurasians

The Holocene (beginning around 12,000 years ago) encompassed some of the most significant changes in human evolution, with far-reaching consequences for the dietary, physical and mental health of present-day populations. Using a dataset of more than 1,600 imputed ancient genomes, we modelled the selection landscape during the transition from hunting and gathering, to farming and pastoralism across West Eurasia. We identify key selection signals related to metabolism, including that selection at the FADS cluster began earlier than previously reported and that selection near the LCT locus predates the emergence of the lactase persistence allele by thousands of years. We also find strong selection in the HLA region, possibly due to increased exposure to pathogens during the Bronze Age. Using ancient individuals to infer local ancestry tracts in over 400,000 samples from the UK Biobank, we identify widespread differences in the distribution of Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age ancestries across Eurasia. By calculating ancestry-specific polygenic risk scores, we show that height differences between Northern and Southern Europe are associated with differential Steppe ancestry, rather than selection, and that risk alleles for mood-related phenotypes are enriched for Neolithic farmer ancestry, whereas risk alleles for diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease are enriched for Western hunter-gatherer ancestry. Our results indicate that ancient selection and migration were large contributors to the distribution of phenotypic diversity in present-day Europeans

Uncovering Blind Spots in Urban Carbon Management: The Role of Consumption-Based Carbon Accounting in Bristol, UK

The rapid urbanisation of the twentieth century, along with the spread of high-consumption urban lifestyles, has led to cities becoming the dominant drivers of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing these impacts is crucial, but production-based frameworks of carbon measurement and mitigation—which encompass only a limited part of cities’ carbon footprints—are much more developed and widely applied than consumption-based approaches that consider the embedded carbon effectively imported into a city. Frequently, therefore, cities are left blind to the importance of their wider consumption-related climate impacts, while at the same time left lacking effective tools to reduce them. To explore the relevance of these issues, we implement methodologies for assessing production- and consumption-based emissions at the city-level and estimate the associated emissions trajectories for Bristol, a major UK city, from 2000 to 2035. We develop mitigation scenarios targeted at reducing the former, considering potential energy, carbon and financial savings in each case. We then compare these mitigation potentials with local government ambitions and Bristol’s consumption-based emissions trajectory. Our results suggest that the city’s consumption-based emissions are three times the production-based emissions, largely due to the impacts of imported food and drink. We find that low-carbon investments of circa £3 billion could reduce production-based emissions by 25% in 2035. However, we also find that this represents <10% of Bristol’s forecast consumption-based emissions for 2035 and is approximately equal to the mitigation achievable by eliminating the city’s current levels of food waste. Such observations suggest that incorporating consumption-based emission statistics into cities’ accounting and decision-making processes could uncover largely unrecognised opportunities for mitigation that are likely to be essential for achieving deep decarbonisation

Towards a public policy of cities and human settlements in the 21st century

Cities and other human settlements are major contributors to climate change and are highly vulnerable to its impacts. They are also uniquely positioned to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lead adaptation efforts. These compound challenges and opportunities require a comprehensive perspective on the public policy of human settlements. Drawing on core literature that has driven debate around cities and climate over recent decades, we put forward a set of boundary objects that can be applied to connect the knowledge of epistemic communities and support an integrated urbanism. We then use these boundary objects to develop the Goals-Intervention-Stakeholder-Enablers (GISE) framework for a public policy of human settlements that is both place-specific and provides insights and tools useful for climate action in cities and other human settlements worldwide. Using examples from Berlin, we apply this framework to show that climate mitigation and adaptation, public health, and well-being goals are closely linked and mutually supportive when a comprehensive approach to urban public policy is applied