Community Emissions
Community GHG Inventory
Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventories
The Community wide GHG Inventory helps the City of Cambridge benchmark community-wide emissions and provides a necessary foundation that enables Cambridge to track progress towards emission reduction goals and engage specific market sectors in actions to reduce emissions.
About the Community GHG Emissions Inventory
In 2022, the City completed a community-wide GHG Inventory for the year 2019.
The community-wide inventory follows the Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories (GPC) developed by the World Resources Institute, C40 Cities, and ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability and required by The Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy (GCoM), of which Cambridge is a member.
Community GHG Emissions Results
Community wide GHG emissions for the City of Cambridge were 1.41 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MTCO2e) in 2019. The emissions were generated in the buildings, transportation, and waste management sectors.
Stationary energy use, such as electricity and natural gas use in buildings, accounted for the majority of the community’s emissions at 83%.
Emissions for the Buildings and Energy sector totaled 1,167,912 MT CO2e with Commercial and Institutional buildings making up the bulk of those emissions at 45% of the total, or 528,953 MTCO2e.
Transportation, which include vehicles registered in Cambridge and a portion of the public transportation system only, accounts for about 10% of community wide emissions.
Most of the transportation emissions are from privately owned passenger and commercial vehicles registered in Cambridge.
Emission from waste management account for about 7% of community-wide emissions.
There are two main sources of emissions from solid waste management: waste sent to landfill and waste sent to incineration. Although only a small portion of our waste goes to landfill, it produces a majority of the emissions from waste. This is because landfilled waste results in methane emissions, which is a GHG that is far more potent than CO2. When waste is incinerated it results primarily in CO2 emissions.
Click here for the full 2012 Community GHG Inventory Report
Click here for methodology used to complete the 2012 Community GHG Inventory