Establishment of city level carbon dioxide emission baseline database and carbon budgets for developing countries with data constraints

One of the major constraints of developing countries in controlling carbon dioxide emissions is the limited availability of an emission database. Since there is no city level emission database in Malaysia, the authors have made the first attempt in the country to establish city level carbon dioxide emission data for different sizes of city using the System Dynamics based FML Model. From the results, it was found that the carbon dioxide emission of a city has a positive correlation with population size and GDP value, and an increasing emission trend is taking place in Malaysia regardless of the size of city. Projections of emission trends up to 2050 showed that if no aggressive actions were taken to cap emissions from the cities, there would be an extreme increase of emissions by as much as more than seven times of the current level. Hence, the authors have proposed three alternative approaches to set a city level carbon budget, i.e. equal share, population and GDP approaches. The study also demonstrated the capability of the present model in estimating present and future city level carbon dioxide emissions. The model can be used for establishment of a city level carbon dioxide emission database for the whole of Malaysia and in future may be applied to other developing countries.