The State of Carbon Neutrality in the Greater Toronto Hamilton Area for 2016

Description

A methodology was developed for creating municipality-scale emission inventories using publicly available online data. A bottom-up emissions inventory of prominent greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide) and criteria air contaminants (carbon monoxide and oxides of nitrogen) in the Greater Toronto Hamilton Area (GTHA) was developed for the year 2016. Emissions from agriculture, buildings, ecosystems, industries, and transportation were estimated in layers and then summed in each individual grid square. The inventory used non-proprietary data and was distributed on a fine grid (four square kilometre grid cells). It was estimated that the GTHA produced 58.6 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, 194,460 tonnes of carbon monoxide, and 106,140 tonnes of nitrogen oxides for the study year. Traffic produced the most of all pollutants except methane, which was dominated by waste (landfills). The inventory was validated against published inventories from Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) and The Atmospheric Fund. The developed methodology can be used by other municipalities to assess their state of carbon neutrality and air pollution. This dataset includes the emissions found for each grid cell, located by latitude and longitude. The exact area of each grid cell is included along with the values of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. The values are normalized by population and area, respectively. Greenhouse gases are combined into megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per square kilometre. A shapefile of the data distributed in grid cells over the Greater Toronto Hamilton Area in Ontario, Canada is included to aid visualization.

Steps to reproduce

Bottom-up emissions inventory calculations were used for the following sectors in the Greater Toronto Hamilton Area: agriculture, buildings, ecosystems, industries, and transportation. Emission factors, primarily from the United States Environmental Protection Agency and Environment and Climate Change Canada were multiplied by activity data. Activity data included but were not limited to: vehicular traffic counts, agricultural activity shapefiles, and landing and takeoff statistics at airports. Industrial emissions were taken from Canada's National Pollutant Release Inventory and Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. Values for each sector were distributed spatially in ArcGIS Pro, then summed within 2km-by-2km grid cells. The layers were then summed to create a heatmap of pollutant emission intensity across the area.

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