World Bank Document

38 ■ CITIES AND CLIMATE CHANGE

made practical with the small and relevant list of Scope 3 activities just listed.
Indeed, a small list of relevant Scope 3 items is the recommendation of WRI
and the U.S. EPA Climate Leaders Program. Th e Scope 3 items listed focus
on critical service provisions required for life in cities that oft en occur out-
side city boundaries; other material fl ows are assumed to be balanced out in
the trade and exchange of goods and services between cities (Ramaswami and
others 2008).

Measurement Impact

Inclusion of additional Scope 3 items has been shown to increase the GHG’s
attributed to cities. Incorporating primarily the impacts of fuel refi ning was
shown to increase GHG emissions associated with eight global cities by as
much as 24 percent (Kennedy and others 2009). Incorporating all fi ve Scope 3
items increases the GHG accounting by an average of 45 percent for eight U.S.
cities studied by Hillman and Ramaswami (2010). Further, incorporating all
fi ve Scope 3 activities (Ramaswami and others 2008) created consistency both
in inclusions and in the numeric per capita GHG emission computed at the city
scale for Denver versus the larger national scale, both of which converged to
about 25 tons of CO 2 e per capita (table 2.4).
A similar analysis repeated for eight U.S. cities showed remarkable consis-
tency between per capita city-scale Scope 1–2–3 emissions and national per
capita emissions in the United States (Hillman and Ramaswami 2010), which
suggests that inclusion of the specifi c list of fi ve Scope 3 items proposed by

TABLE 2.4
Denver’s Average per Capita GHG Emissions Compared with the
National Average, State of Colorado Average, and Other Colorado Cities

Inclusions

Denver’s per capita GHG

emissions (million tons

CO 2 e per capita)

National, state, or other

city per capita GHG

emissions (CO 2 e per

capita)

Scope 1 + 2 and waste
plus airline travel and key
urban materials

25.3 National: 24.5

Colorado: 25.2

Scope 1 + 2 and waste (no
airline travel or embodied
energy of key urban
materials)

18 Other Colorado cities:

17.8–18.4

Source: Adapted from Ramaswami and others 2008.
Note: CO 2 e = carbon dioxide equivalent; GHG = greenhouse gas.