As the focal point of the Local Governments and Municipal Authorities at the UNFCCC1, ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability promotes the reporting of local and regional climaterelated data, including greenhouse (GHG) inventories, targets of GHG emission reduction, and data on climate action planning. This is done through the CDP-ICLEI Unified Reporting System where entities report in the frame of various climate initiatives to show and track their contribution to tackling climate change (CDP, 2021).
In order to assess opportunities for improvement of GHG inventory elaboration through the support of atmospheric observations, ICLEI has conducted an analysis on a set of GHG inventories, with the aim to identify issues that local and regional governments face in terms of data availability and quality. For this, a list of cities that reported relevant data in 2020 was selected based on the ambition of their climate commitments and their involvement in climate initiatives. The sample was taken in order to assess a defined number of cities, which means that the outcomes of the analysis do not necessarily represent the reality of all reporting entities (e.g., regarding the existence of the
described issues, or lack of others), and instead the authors intend to illustrate some of the issues encountered during the current reporting.