08.04.2015:The climate-KIC funded programme initiative "Low Carbon City Lab" (LoCaL), strives to develop innovative new methods to monitor GHG emissions in cities, to provide decision making tools to city authorities based on the obtained data, and to verify implemented actions. The initiative ist a joint project of the GFZ, the South Pole Carbon Group (Zürich, Schweiz), the National Physical Laboratory (London, UK), and the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement (Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France).

As much as 70% of the total anthropogenic GHGs today are emitted by cities. The UN estimates that in 2050 approx. 75% of the world population will live in cities, with a growth rate of 1.8% per year which is almost twice as high as the global average. This makes cities the key nexus for climate action during the next decades.

GFZ and its industry partner virtualcitySYSTEMS are developing the geo-informatics tools for LoCal that will provide spatial monitoring data for use in planning tools for cities, a prerequisite for the effective implementation of GHG reduction.

The official launch of the programme will be at the ICLEI World Congress in Seoul, South Korea on April 8th. http://worldcongress2015.iclei.org/.

Contact:

Martin Wattenbach, martin.wattenbach@gfz-potsdam.de

More info:

www.climate-kic.org/programmes/low-carbon-city-lab