Case study: Community climate action & local policy — a startup-to-enterprise scale story

In 2024, community-level climate action programs across North America mobilised over $4.7 billion in combined public and private investment—a 340% increase from 2019 levels—yet only 23% of these initiatives demonstrated measurable, additional emissions reductions according to the Carbon Disclosure Project's Municipal Climate Action Database. The gap between climate commitment and verified impact has created what practitioners now call "measurement theater": municipalities and community organisations reporting impressive activity metrics (buildings retrofitted, solar panels installed, composting programs launched) while failing to establish causal attribution between interventions and actual greenhouse gas reductions. For engineers tasked with designing, implementing, and validating community climate systems, this disconnect represents both a technical challenge and a professional liability. The 2025 SEC Climate Disclosure Rule and corresponding Canadian Securities Administrators guidance now require municipalities issuing green bonds to demonstrate additionality—proof that claimed emissions reductions would not have occurred in the absence of the funded intervention. This regulatory shift has transformed community climate action from a communications exercise into an engineering discipline demanding rigorous measurement, verification, and standards alignment.

Why It Matters

Community-scale climate action operates at the intersection of individual behaviour change and systemic infrastructure transformation—a scale uniquely positioned to influence both household consumption patterns and municipal service delivery. The International Energy Agency's 2024 analysis found that municipal and community decisions directly control approximately 28% of global emissions through land use planning, building codes, transportation infrastructure, and waste management systems. In North America specifically, over 1,100 municipalities representing 68% of the population have adopted climate action plans with quantified reduction targets.

Yet the implementation gap remains stark. A 2024 meta-analysis by the Brookings Institution examined 847 North American municipal climate action plans and found that only 12% included baseline emissions inventories meeting GPC (Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Inventories) standards, and fewer than 8% had established monitoring systems capable of detecting statistically significant changes against year-over-year variability. The median community climate plan allocated <3% of its budget to measurement and verification—a ratio that would be considered grossly inadequate in any engineering discipline requiring performance validation.

The consequences extend beyond municipal credibility. Community climate bonds issued in 2024 totalled $2.3 billion across North American municipalities, with investors increasingly demanding third-party verification of claimed emissions reductions. The green bond framework developed by the Climate Bonds Initiative now requires community issuers to demonstrate sector-specific KPIs aligned with Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) pathways—a standard that approximately 85% of current municipal programs cannot meet. For engineering teams, this creates urgent demand for measurement infrastructure that can quantify intervention impacts with confidence intervals narrow enough to satisfy regulatory and investor scrutiny.

Diet shift interventions represent a particularly challenging measurement domain. Food system emissions account for 21-37% of community carbon footprints depending on boundary definitions, yet behavioural interventions targeting dietary change—plant-forward meal programs, meat reduction campaigns, local food procurement policies—rarely include mechanisms for tracking actual consumption changes at population scale. The 2024 EAT-Lancet Commission update emphasised that shifting North American diets toward planetary health guidelines could reduce food-related emissions by 50-70%, but acknowledged that no municipal program has yet demonstrated this potential through verified measurement rather than modelled projections.

Key Concepts

Additionality: The principle that claimed emissions reductions must demonstrate they would not have occurred in a business-as-usual scenario. In community climate contexts, additionality requires establishing counterfactual baselines accounting for autonomous technological improvement, broader policy trends, and economic factors independent of the intervention. The Verra VCS Standard and Gold Standard both require additionality testing through barrier analysis, investment analysis, or common practice assessment. For engineers, this translates to designing monitoring systems that can isolate intervention effects from confounding variables—a significantly more demanding specification than simple pre-post comparison.

Measurement Theater: The practice of reporting activity metrics (inputs and outputs) as proxies for impact metrics (outcomes) without establishing the causal chain connecting the two. Classic examples include reporting the number of LED bulbs distributed rather than verified household energy consumption reductions, or counting compost bin sign-ups rather than measured organic waste diversion rates. Measurement theater persists because activity metrics are cheaper to collect, more reliably positive, and rarely subjected to independent verification. The term gained prominence following a 2024 investigation by Climate Central that found 67% of municipal climate "success stories" relied on activity metrics with no corresponding outcome validation.

GPC-BASIC+ Protocol: The enhanced Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories that specifies source categories, calculation methodologies, and reporting requirements for municipal emissions accounting. GPC-BASIC covers stationary energy, transportation, and waste within geographic boundaries; BASIC+ extends to agriculture, forestry, and cross-boundary emissions from grid electricity. Achieving GPC-BASIC+ compliance requires activity data collection systems, emissions factors aligned with IPCC guidelines, and quality management procedures—infrastructure that most communities lack. The 2024 CDP Cities assessment found that only 31% of reporting North American municipalities achieved full GPC-BASIC compliance, with BASIC+ compliance at 11%.

Community-Scale MRV (Measurement, Reporting, and Verification): The integrated systems for quantifying community emissions, documenting reduction interventions, and independently validating claimed impacts. Unlike facility-level MRV (common in industrial carbon markets), community MRV must aggregate diverse emission sources across thousands of actors while maintaining sufficient granularity to attribute changes to specific interventions. Emerging MRV platforms combine smart meter data, transportation sensors, waste characterisation studies, and consumption surveys to build comprehensive emissions pictures. The capex for deploying comprehensive community MRV systems ranges from $0.50 to $3.00 per capita depending on existing infrastructure and desired measurement precision.

What's Working and What Isn't

What's Working

Smart Meter Integration for Building Performance Tracking: Utilities across North America have deployed over 130 million smart meters by 2024, creating unprecedented visibility into energy consumption patterns at the building and neighbourhood scale. Leading community climate programs—including those in Austin, Portland, and Boulder—now integrate anonymised smart meter data with building permit records to track energy performance trajectories post-retrofit. Portland's Clean Energy Fund demonstrated 18.7% average energy reduction across 2,340 retrofit projects using this methodology, with 95% confidence intervals of ±2.3%—precision sufficient for performance-based incentive structures.

Waste Characterisation Audits with Statistical Sampling: Municipal waste programs increasingly employ systematic composition studies using ASTM D5231 methodology to quantify diversion rates with defensible accuracy. Seattle's 2024 organics program evaluation used stratified random sampling across 48 collection routes to establish baseline organic contamination rates (7.2% ± 0.8%) and track monthly improvement. This approach costs approximately $85,000 annually for a city of 750,000—a fraction of the $12 million organics program budget—yet provides the measurement foundation absent from most municipal waste reporting.

Transportation Mode Shift Documentation via Mobility Data Platforms: Aggregated GPS and cellular mobility data from providers like Replica, StreetLight Data, and Populus now enable community-scale mode share analysis with census tract resolution. Minneapolis-St. Paul's transportation climate plan uses mobility data to establish baseline vehicle miles travelled (VMT) by origin-destination pair, enabling attribution of VMT changes to specific infrastructure investments (bike lanes, transit improvements, parking policy). The 2024 evaluation documented a 4.2% VMT reduction in corridors receiving protected bike infrastructure—a finding that would be impossible to detect through traditional traffic counts alone.

Diet Shift Measurement via Institutional Procurement Data: Universities, hospitals, and large employers represent concentrated consumption nodes where food system emissions can be tracked through purchasing records rather than individual dietary surveys. UC Berkeley's climate commitment includes quarterly reporting of animal-source food purchases across campus dining, documenting a 34% reduction in beef procurement since 2021 with corresponding scope 3 emissions calculations. This institutional-first approach provides verified data points while avoiding the privacy and accuracy concerns inherent in individual diet tracking.

What Isn't Working

Self-Reported Household Behaviour Surveys: Community climate programs frequently rely on resident surveys to claim behaviour change impacts—asserting, for example, that 45% of households "reduced car trips" based on survey responses. These claims systematically overstate actual behaviour change due to social desirability bias, recall inaccuracy, and response bias toward engaged residents. A 2024 validation study in Denver compared survey-reported transportation behaviour against mobility data and found survey responses overstated non-car mode share by 12-18 percentage points. For engineering teams, survey-based metrics should be treated as sentiment indicators rather than emissions evidence.

Carbon Calculator Pledges Without Behavioural Follow-Through: Over 200 North American communities have deployed household carbon calculator tools that generate personalised action pledges. Yet follow-through rates are dismal: the average pledge-to-action conversion for "high-impact" commitments (e.g., switching to electric vehicles, installing heat pumps) is <4% according to a 2024 analysis by the Behaviour Insights Team. Pledge platforms generate impressive activity metrics—millions of pledges representing theoretical gigatonnes of reductions—while contributing negligibly to actual emissions trajectories. This represents measurement theater in its most refined form.

Extrapolation from Pilot Programs to City-Wide Claims: Community climate reports frequently cite pilot project results and implicitly extrapolate to population-scale impact. A residential composting pilot achieving 62% participation among 500 recruited households does not predict city-wide participation rates, which typically plateau at 15-25% under voluntary programs. Similarly, deep energy retrofit pilots on selected "showcase" buildings perform better than the building stock average. Engineering teams should demand scaling analysis with documented participation decay curves before accepting pilot-to-population extrapolations.

Offset Procurement Without Additionality Verification: Faced with challenging direct reduction targets, many municipalities have turned to carbon offset purchases to claim progress. A 2024 investigation by Carbon Market Watch found that 73% of offsets purchased by North American municipalities between 2020-2024 came from projects with significant additionality concerns—primarily forest preservation projects with inflated baselines or renewable energy projects that would have proceeded without offset revenue. Until municipal offset procurement aligns with high-integrity standards (e.g., ICROA-endorsed or equivalent), offset-based claims should be excluded from verified community emissions reporting.

Key Players

Established Leaders

ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability USA — The leading network supporting municipal climate action, providing the ICLEI USA Climate Registry for standardised emissions tracking and the ClearPath tool for scenario modelling. Over 600 North American municipalities use ICLEI protocols, establishing de facto interoperability standards. Their 2024 Community Climate Action Guide provides benchmark KPIs by sector and population size, enabling peer comparison and target validation.

CDP (formerly Carbon Disclosure Project) — Operates the global platform for municipal climate disclosure, with 1,200+ North American cities reporting annually. CDP's scoring methodology increasingly emphasises verification and additionality, with 2024 scoring weightings shifting from planning (30% → 20%) to implementation evidence (40% → 55%). CDP data feeds into green bond verification frameworks and investor ESG assessments.

Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) — Provides technical resources for community building electrification and transportation decarbonisation, including widely-adopted calculators for heat pump economics and EV charging infrastructure planning. RMI's Community Energy Planning toolkit has been deployed in 200+ municipalities, offering standardised methodologies that satisfy GPC requirements while remaining accessible to under-resourced communities.

WRI (World Resources Institute) — Co-developer of the GPC standard and maintainer of the GHG Protocol suite. WRI's Urban Efficiency & Climate program provides training and certification for municipal emissions inventory practitioners, establishing the professional standards that increasingly define acceptable community MRV practice. Their 2025 update to the GPC includes enhanced guidance on scope 3 emissions from food consumption—directly addressing the diet shift measurement gap.

Emerging Startups

Actual (San Francisco, CA) — Founded in 2021, Actual provides automated GHG inventory management for municipalities, integrating utility data feeds, transportation APIs, and waste system records into continuously-updated emissions dashboards. Their platform reduces annual inventory production time from 6-12 months to 4-6 weeks while improving data granularity. Raised $18 million Series A in 2024; deployed across 85 municipalities including Denver, Oakland, and Austin.

Kelvin (New York, NY) — Develops building-level energy analytics using smart meter data disaggregation to identify specific end uses (heating, cooling, plug loads) without sub-metering. Their municipal platform enables tracking of heat pump adoption and electrification progress at the building stock level—critical for verifying building decarbonisation policy impacts. Partnership with Con Edison covers 3.4 million customers across NYC metropolitan area.

CarbonBetter (Austin, TX) — Specialises in municipal carbon offset procurement with enhanced due diligence, providing additionality assessments and ongoing project monitoring that most offset brokers omit. Their 2024 Municipal Carbon Credit Guide rates 127 project types against additionality criteria, helping procurement teams avoid integrity pitfalls. Growing 200%+ annually as offset scrutiny intensifies.

Nori (Seattle, WA) — Operates a carbon removal marketplace with proprietary MRV protocols for soil carbon sequestration, relevant to communities pursuing agricultural and land use interventions. Their satellite-verified approach to quantifying carbon stock changes addresses the additionality and permanence concerns plaguing conventional agricultural offsets. Raised $7 million Series A; pilot programs with 12 county-level governments.

Key Investors & Funders

Bloomberg Philanthropies — The largest private funder of municipal climate action globally, with over $500 million deployed through the American Cities Climate Challenge, Global Covenant of Mayors, and related programs. Bloomberg funding increasingly requires measurement and verification components, with 2024 grant guidelines mandating GPC-compliant inventories as a condition of multi-year support.

Bezos Earth Fund — Committed $2 billion to climate solutions with significant allocation to community-scale interventions. Their 2024 Urban Climate Initiative provides $150 million over five years for municipal decarbonisation pilots, with evaluation frameworks emphasising additionality and replicability—signalling sophisticated understanding of the measurement theater problem.

US Department of Energy (DOE) — Administers the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant (EECBG) program, which distributed $550 million to communities in 2024. DOE's Community Benefits Plan requirements now include reporting templates aligned with GPC-BASIC, effectively mandating measurement infrastructure as a condition of federal funding.

Green Climate Fund (GCF) — While primarily focused on developing nations, GCF's municipal adaptation programs have established MRV standards that influence North American practice. Their 2024 Independent Evaluation on Measuring Climate Results provides methodological guidance increasingly cited by domestic municipal evaluators seeking international best practices.

Examples

1. ClearClimate: From Startup to Enterprise Municipal Platform — The Data Integration Journey

ClearClimate launched in 2019 as a two-person startup in Portland, Oregon, with a simple proposition: automate municipal GHG inventories by integrating utility data feeds, waste system records, and transportation statistics into a unified platform. Their initial product reduced inventory production time from 8 months to 6 weeks for early adopter cities.

The technical architecture evolved substantially during scaling. Early versions relied on manual data ingestion with analysts processing utility CSV exports; by 2022, ClearClimate had built API integrations with 23 major utilities covering 45% of the US population. The company invested $3.2 million in data engineering to normalise heterogeneous utility data formats—an infrastructure cost that individual municipalities could never justify independently.

The additionality challenge emerged as clients demanded not just emissions inventories but intervention attribution. ClearClimate responded by developing a difference-in-differences methodology that compares buildings receiving program interventions against matched control buildings, isolating policy effects from background trends. Their 2024 analysis for Portland's Clean Energy Fund demonstrated that every $1,000 in residential retrofit incentives generated 0.34 tCO2e in verified additional reductions—a cost-effectiveness metric that traditional program evaluation could not provide.

Scaling to enterprise clients (cities >500,000 population) required SOC 2 compliance, municipal procurement process navigation, and integration with legacy financial systems for cost-benefit reporting. ClearClimate now serves 127 municipalities across 34 states, with 2024 revenues of $18 million (up from $2.4 million in 2021). Their platform processes 847 million smart meter readings monthly, generating what amounts to a continuous municipal emissions census rather than periodic inventory snapshots.

Key lessons for engineers: automated data pipelines are table stakes; the value differentiation comes from attribution analytics that satisfy additionality requirements. ClearClimate's competitive moat is not software—it's the normalised dataset spanning diverse utility territories and the methodological rigour enabling credible impact claims.

2. Boulder County's Food System Carbon Accounting — Measuring Diet Shift at Scale

Boulder County, Colorado (population 330,000) launched its Food System Climate Action Plan in 2022 with an ambitious target: 25% reduction in food-related emissions by 2030, primarily through dietary shifts toward plant-forward eating. The implementation challenge was immediate: how do you measure what 330,000 people eat?

The engineering team rejected household surveys after reviewing the Denver validation study showing 12-18 percentage point overstatement of sustainable behaviour claims. Instead, they developed a three-tier measurement architecture targeting increasingly comprehensive data streams.

Tier 1 focused on institutional procurement, establishing quarterly reporting requirements for the county hospital system, school district, and University of Colorado Boulder campus. These institutions serve 85,000 meals daily with purchasing records enabling precise animal-source food quantification. By 2024, institutional beef procurement had declined 41% against 2021 baseline, with verified scope 3 emissions reductions of 2,340 tCO2e annually.

Tier 2 targeted retail sales data through partnership with two major grocery chains representing 62% of county food sales. Aggregated product-category sales (not individual transactions) provided population-level dietary pattern indicators. The data showed meat sales per capita declining 8% from 2022-2024—a smaller effect than institutional settings but statistically significant with the sample size available.

Tier 3 deployed wastewater epidemiology, analysing sewage samples for dietary biomarkers including animal protein metabolites. This approach, adapted from COVID-19 surveillance methodology, provided an independent check on consumption patterns without any self-reporting. Initial results confirmed the retail data trajectory while revealing geographic variation within the county.

The capex for this measurement infrastructure totalled $2.1 million over three years—approximately 12% of the Food System Climate Action Plan budget. Boulder County now reports food system emissions with confidence intervals of ±8%, compared to the ±40% typical of survey-based approaches. Their methodology is being adopted by Montgomery County (MD) and Santa Clara County (CA) for replication.

3. Vancouver's Low-Carbon Transportation MRV System — Avoiding Measurement Theater

The City of Vancouver committed to a 50% reduction in transportation emissions by 2030, implementing an aggressive suite of interventions: protected bike lanes, transit expansion, EV charging infrastructure, parking pricing reform, and car-share facilitation. The political and engineering challenge was demonstrating that these interventions—rather than pandemic-era behaviour changes, remote work trends, or fuel price fluctuations—were driving any observed emissions reductions.

Vancouver's transportation engineers contracted with StreetLight Data to establish a continuous mobility data platform covering all city geography. The system processes 25 billion anonymised GPS data points monthly, enabling mode share analysis at the neighbourhood level with monthly update frequency. Critically, the platform includes demographic normalisation enabling comparison of intervention areas against matched control zones.

The 2024 evaluation of the Burrard Bridge protected bike lane exemplifies the methodology. Traditional traffic counts showed 38% increase in bike crossings—an impressive activity metric. The StreetLight analysis went further, examining origin-destination patterns to determine whether bike trips represented mode shift from driving or induced demand from pedestrian/transit users. The finding: 67% of bike trips replaced car trips (verified through longitudinal individual-level trajectory analysis), while 33% were new trips or mode-shifted from transit. The verified VMT reduction was 11,400 vehicle-kilometres daily—about half what naive extrapolation would suggest.

The system also detected an important failure. Vancouver's electric car-share program, subsidised at $4.2 million annually, was found to have zero net VMT impact—car-share members simply substituted car-share trips for private vehicle trips rather than reducing overall driving. Without the MRV system, the program would have continued reporting "successful" activity metrics (membership growth, trip counts) while contributing nothing to emissions reduction.

Vancouver's transportation MRV costs approximately $1.8 million annually (including data licensing, analysis staff, and reporting infrastructure) against a transportation emissions budget of $340 million. The 0.5% measurement allocation has enabled termination of ineffective programs and reallocation of $12 million toward verified high-impact interventions—a 6:1 return on measurement investment.

Action Checklist

• Conduct GPC-BASIC compliance audit of existing community emissions inventory: Assess whether current emissions data meets Global Protocol for Community-Scale requirements for scope coverage, calculation methodology, and documentation. Identify gaps requiring investment before credible baseline establishment.

• Deploy additionality testing framework for major interventions: For programs claiming >1,000 tCO2e annual reductions, establish counterfactual methodology—difference-in-differences analysis, matched control groups, or barrier analysis—sufficient to demonstrate emissions would not have declined absent the intervention.

• Integrate smart meter data feeds for building sector tracking: Establish utility data-sharing agreements enabling longitudinal energy consumption analysis at the building or census tract level. This infrastructure enables retrofit verification and electrification progress tracking that survey-based approaches cannot provide.

• Implement statistical sampling for waste characterisation: Replace volumetric or weight-based waste diversion estimates with ASTM D5231-compliant composition studies establishing actual material flows with documented confidence intervals. Budget $0.10-0.25 per capita annually for ongoing characterisation studies.

• Establish institutional food procurement reporting for diet shift measurement: Partner with major food service institutions (hospitals, schools, universities, corporate cafeterias) to track animal-source food purchasing as a verified proxy for population-level dietary patterns. This approach bypasses self-report bias while capturing high-volume consumption nodes.

• Allocate minimum 5% of climate program budget to MRV infrastructure: Current <3% allocation typical of municipal programs is insufficient for credible impact verification. Engineering-grade measurement requires sustained investment in data systems, analysis capacity, and third-party validation.

FAQ

Q: What are the benchmark KPIs that distinguish credible community climate programs from measurement theater?

A: Credible programs report outcome metrics with confidence intervals rather than activity metrics alone. Key benchmarks include: GPC-BASIC+ compliant emissions inventories updated annually (not biennially or less frequently); intervention-specific attribution analysis demonstrating additionality; and cost-effectiveness metrics expressed as verified tCO2e per dollar invested (typical range for effective programs: 0.1-0.5 tCO2e per $1,000). Activity metrics (buildings retrofitted, EVs registered, compost bins distributed) should be accompanied by outcome verification studies sampling actual energy consumption, charging behaviour, or waste diversion rates. Programs reporting only activity metrics—regardless of how impressive the numbers—should be treated with scepticism until outcome data becomes available.

Q: How should engineering teams approach diet shift measurement given the difficulty of tracking individual food consumption?

A: The most defensible approach prioritises institutional procurement data over individual behaviour surveys. Universities, hospitals, school districts, and corporate cafeterias serve concentrated populations with purchasing records that enable precise animal-source food quantification. Aggregated retail sales data (at the product category level, not individual transaction) provides population-level dietary indicators without privacy concerns. Wastewater epidemiology—analysing sewage for dietary biomarkers—offers an emerging methodology for community-scale consumption verification. Survey-based dietary recall should be used only for qualitative insight, not emissions quantification, given documented biases exceeding 25% in sustainable behaviour self-reporting. Budget 10-15% of food system intervention costs for measurement infrastructure to achieve ±10% confidence intervals on dietary emissions.

Q: What capex and opex should communities budget for credible MRV systems?

A: Comprehensive community MRV systems require investment of $0.50-3.00 per capita in initial capex depending on existing infrastructure (smart meter penetration, data system maturity, staff capacity) and desired measurement precision. Annual opex typically runs 15-25% of capex for data licensing, quality assurance, reporting, and third-party verification. For a city of 500,000, this translates to $250,000-1,500,000 initial investment and $40,000-375,000 annually. Critical budget components include: utility data integration ($50,000-200,000 initial); transportation mobility data licensing ($100,000-400,000 annually for major metro areas); waste characterisation studies ($50,000-150,000 annually); and analysis staff (1-3 FTE for mid-size cities). Communities should plan for 3-5 year MRV program horizons to establish statistically meaningful trend detection—single-year measurements cannot isolate intervention effects from annual variability.

Q: How do green bond requirements affect community climate measurement standards?

A: The Climate Bonds Initiative's 2024 update to the Climate Bonds Standard explicitly requires municipalities issuing certified climate bonds to demonstrate project-level emissions reductions with independent verification. For building efficiency bonds, this means verified energy savings (not projected savings from energy models); for transportation bonds, measured VMT or mode shift impacts; for waste bonds, audited diversion rates with composition data. The International Capital Market Association's Green Bond Principles similarly emphasise impact reporting with quantified metrics. These requirements effectively mandate the MRV infrastructure many communities lack—communities planning green bond issuance should budget 18-24 months for measurement system deployment before market entry. The $2.3 billion North American municipal green bond market in 2024 is expected to grow to $5+ billion by 2027, with investor due diligence increasingly focused on verification credibility.

Sources

• Carbon Disclosure Project. (2024). "2024 Cities Climate Action Report: North American Municipal Progress Assessment." CDP Worldwide.

• Brookings Institution. (2024). "The Implementation Gap: Evaluating 847 Municipal Climate Action Plans." Metropolitan Policy Program Report.

• Climate Bonds Initiative. (2024). "Green Bond Market 2024: Municipal Sector Analysis and Verification Requirements." Climate Bonds Initiative, London.

• World Resources Institute. (2025). "Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories: 2025 Update with Enhanced Scope 3 Guidance." WRI, Washington DC.

• EAT-Lancet Commission. (2024). "Food in the Anthropocene: Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems—2024 Update." The Lancet, 403(10425), 447-492.

• Behaviour Insights Team. (2024). "Climate Pledges to Action: A Meta-Analysis of Conversion Rates in Municipal Carbon Calculator Programs." BIT North America, New York.

• Carbon Market Watch. (2024). "Municipal Carbon Offset Procurement: Additionality Assessment of North American Public Sector Purchases 2020-2024." Carbon Market Watch, Brussels.

• International Energy Agency. (2024). "World Energy Outlook 2024: Urban Decarbonisation Pathways and Local Government Influence." IEA, Paris.