Digital twins can prevent US cities under-reporting their carbon emissions, according to Chicago-based Cityzenith.

This follows a report in Nature Communications, the journal for research across the natural sciences, that says cities across the USA are under-reporting their carbon emissions by an average of 18.3%.

The report found huge discrepancies in measurement, with some cities under-reporting emissions by as much as 145.5%, and the total amount of potentially unreported carbon equating to 129 million metric tons. A Clean Cities, Clean Future campaign launched by digital twin provider Cityzenith has offered to help address this.

Kevin Gurney of Northern Arizona University said the cities’ problem is not so much that they are deliberately under-reporting carbon emissions, but that they simply do not have the technology to measure them.

Gurney and his team have developed Vulcan, an automated measurement system that can estimate fossil-fuel emissions at specific geographic points and across large areas. The team compared Vulcan’s estimates of greenhouse gas emissions between 2010 and 2015 with those reported in 48 city inventories, which discovered many US cities were not measuring their emissions accurately.

Gurney used measuring heating emissions as an example. “Heating oil statistics are difficult to get,” he said. “Cities will often just not include the heating oil in their total building estimates.”

He added that cities were also using different methods to measure emissions from various sources, such as airborne, on-road and marine:

“The analysis highlights the need for a systematic, consistent approach to accounting for carbon emissions across the USA, because inaccurate estimates make it difficult to assess how effective emissions reduction efforts are,” he said.

The World Economic Forum says cities are crucial for the journey to net-zero emissions. Despite only covering three per cent of the Earth’s land surface, urban areas are responsible for more than 70% of global carbon emissions.

Emily Tan, city general manager at Shell Renewable & Climate, also called for a consistent approach to the problem. “Integrations need to be innovated and delivered,” she said. “This will require unprecedented collaboration between the government, industry and society. But the urgency has never been greater. After all, making cities sustainable places to live and work for future generations will be imperative if the world is to meet the broader goals of the Paris Agreement and move closer to a net-zero emissions world.”

Cityzenith CEO Michael Jansen is adamant that the answer to effective measurement and management of carbon emissions within urban areas is digital twin technology.

“This report should be a real eye-opener to everyone working to address the 2016 Paris Agreement and push back against climate change,” he said. “We already knew that urban emissions were by far the biggest contributor to the greenhouse gases causing our world to heat up and threaten human life and prosperity, but it now seems that some of the parameters must change through this inadvertent under-reporting.”

He said that, fortunately, digital twin 3D modelling through a platform such as Cityzenith’s SmartWorld OS software could aggregate all new data, and then use AI to develop lasting solutions to the problems highlighted by Nature Communications and the Vulcan team.

“We are raising $15m through regulation A+ crowd funding and, as part of our Clean Cities, Clean Future campaign, we are donating our SmartWorld OS technology platform to one city at a time for every $1m raised to help create carbon neutral cities,” said Jansen. “And the great news is we have already raised more than $2m from more than 1000 new shareholders since launching our investment platform on our web site at the end of last year, which will allow the first cities to benefit to be announced in the second quarter of 2021.”

Cityzenith is based in Chicago with offices in London and New Delhi. The company’s SmartWorld Pro2 digital twin platform was created for anyone designing, constructing and managing complex, large-scale building projects, properties and real estate portfolios.