Bottom-up approach for downscaling CO2 emissions in Taiwan: robustness analysis and policy implications

The roles and responsibilities of cities in CO2 mitigation have drawn increasing attention in recent years. To facilitate optimal design of effective mitigation policies, it is important for city authorities to understand the magnitudes and sources of their CO2 emissions, and their relative shares of emissions at a higher spatial level. Although several studies estimate CO2 emissions at the city level, the robustness of these estimates and their linkage to emissions at a higher level remains unclear. This kind of localized information on emissions is important for coordination of climate policies at different spatial scales. The study aims to fill a gap in understanding by building a systematic bottom-up approach for estimating urban CO2 emissions and offering a consistency check with IPCC top–down estimates. Using Taiwan as a case study, we display the geographic distribution of CO2 emissions. The significance and implications of the downscaling CO2 emissions are indicated accordingly.