what does carbon accountability actually require at the data layer — and why do existing frameworks fail?
A city cannot be held accountable for what it cannot measure. This work traces carbon accounting down to its data layer — the registries, meters, and reporting boundaries — and shows where the standard frameworks quietly break down at municipal scale.
(data-layer audit — reporting boundaries)
(emissions ledger — city scale)
(gap analysis — existing frameworks)
Five years of GHG inventories, climate-risk assessments, and action plans across 15+ cities — strategies carrying 8M+ tCO₂e of reduction potential and $25B+ of identified investment. The plans were only ever as good as the data underneath, and the data layer kept failing in the same ways. This is where the obsession started.
(method)
(next)
koliwadas — embedded participatory method
→
01
audit
tracing where each reported number actually comes from, and where it is silently assumed.
02
model
reconstructing a city inventory that is honest about its own uncertainty.
03
propose
a data layer municipalities can maintain without a dedicated analytics team.