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Urban Carbon Fluxes

Urban skyline

This is an article collection published in Carbon Balance and Management.

Today, over half of the world's population live in urban areas and this is expected to rise to around 70% by 2050. With urbanization progressing ever more quickly, it is important to quantify the carbon emissions from urban areas and understand the underlying carbon dynamics to inform effective carbon mitigation strategies for cities and towns.

Towards that goal, this article collection presents novel research, methods and reviews on carbon fluxes in urban areas. This may include bleeding edge carbon measurement techniques (e.g. in situ, aircraft and remote-sensing), individual and ensemble modelling approaches, or improvements to carbon accounting (e.g. emission inventories) and uncertainty assessment, all within the context of urban areas in general, or applied to a specific urban region. Research of carbon fluxes (CO2, CH4, CO and other relevant species) from all levels of spatial and temporal scale is considered ans the series as a whole aims to integrate previous research to broaden its scale and build new consensus.

Submission Instructions

Before submitting your manuscript, please ensure you have carefully read the submission guidelines for Carbon Balance and Management. The complete manuscript should be submitted through the Carbon Balance and Management submission system. To ensure that you submit to the correct article collection please select the appropriate article collection in the drop-down menu upon submission. In addition, indicate within your cover letter that you wish your manuscript to be considered as part of the article collection 'Urban Carbon Fluxes'. All submissions will undergo rigorous peer review and accepted articles will be published within the journal as a collection.

Edited by: Tomohiro Oda and Georgii Alexandrov


Published articles in this collection:

  1. Air pollution in China has raised great concerns due to its adverse effects on air quality, human health, and climate. Emissions of air pollutants (APs) are inherently linked with CO2 emissions through fossil-ene...

    Authors: Xiaohui Lin, Ruqi Yang, Wen Zhang, Ning Zeng, Yu Zhao, Guocheng Wang, Tingting Li and Qixiang Cai
    Citation: Carbon Balance and Management 2023 18:9
    Content type: Research Published on:

  2. Cities are a major source of atmospheric CO2; however, understanding the surface CO2 exchange processes that determine the net CO2 flux emitted from each city is challenging owing to the high heterogeneity of urb...

    Authors: Chaerin Park, Sujong Jeong, Moon-Soo Park, Hoonyoung Park, Jeongmin Yun, Sang-Sam Lee and Sung-Hwa Park
    Citation: Carbon Balance and Management 2022 17:3
    Content type: Research Published on:

  3. Networks of tower-based CO2 mole fraction sensors have been deployed by various groups in and around cities across the world to quantify anthropogenic CO2 emissions from metropolitan areas. A critical aspect in t...

    Authors: Natasha L. Miles, Kenneth J. Davis, Scott J. Richardson, Thomas Lauvaux, Douglas K. Martins, A. J. Deng, Nikolay Balashov, Kevin R. Gurney, Jianming Liang, Geoff Roest, Jonathan A. Wang and Jocelyn C. Turnbull
    Citation: Carbon Balance and Management 2021 16:4
    Content type: Research Published on:

  4. With a lack of United States federal policy to address climate change, cities, the private sector, and universities have shouldered much of the work to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissio...

    Authors: Wiley J. Hundertmark, Marissa Lee, Ian A. Smith, Ashley H. Y. Bang, Vivien Chen, Conor K. Gately, Pamela H. Templer and Lucy R. Hutyra
    Citation: Carbon Balance and Management 2021 16:1
    Content type: Research Published on:

  5. Quantifying CO2 emissions from cities is of great importance because cities contribute more than 70% of the global total CO2 emissions. As the largest urbanized megalopolis region in northern China, the Beijing-T...

    Authors: Pengfei Han, Ning Zeng, Tomohiro Oda, Wen Zhang, Xiaohui Lin, Di Liu, Qixiang Cai, Xiaolin Ma, Wenjun Meng, Guocheng Wang, Rong Wang and Bo Zheng
    Citation: Carbon Balance and Management 2020 15:25
    Content type: Research Published on:

  6. Cities contribute more than 70% of global anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and are leading the effort to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through sustainable planning and development. However, ur...

    Authors: Geoffrey S. Roest, K. R. Gurney, S. M. Miller and J. Liang
    Citation: Carbon Balance and Management 2020 15:22
    Content type: Research Published on:

  7. Compilation of emission inventories (EIs) for cities is a whole new challenge to assess the subnational climate mitigation effort under the Paris Climate Agreement. Some cities have started compiling EIs, ofte...

    Authors: Jingwen Chen, Fang Zhao, Ning Zeng and Tomohiro Oda
    Citation: Carbon Balance and Management 2020 15:9
    Content type: Research Published on:

  8. It is important to quantify changes in CO2 sources and sinks with land use and land cover change. In the last several decades, carbon sources and sinks in East Asia have been altered by intensive land cover chang...

    Authors: Je-Woo Hong, Jinkyu Hong, Junghwa Chun, Yong Hee Lee, Lim-Seok Chang, Jae-Bum Lee, Keewook Yi, Young-San Park, Young-Hwa Byun and Sangwon Joo
    Citation: Carbon Balance and Management 2019 14:13
    Content type: Research Published on:

  9. In order to use in situ measurements to constrain urban anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), we use a Lagrangian methodology based on diffusive backward trajectory tracer reconstructions and Bayesian ...

    Authors: Ignacio Pisso, Prabir Patra, Masayuki Takigawa, Toshinobu Machida, Hidekazu Matsueda and Yousuke Sawa
    Citation: Carbon Balance and Management 2019 14:6
    Content type: Research Published on:

  10. Urban trees have long been valued for providing ecosystem services (mitigation of the “heat island” effect, suppression of air pollution, etc.); more recently the potential of urban forests to store significan...

    Authors: Phil Wilkes, Mathias Disney, Matheus Boni Vicari, Kim Calders and Andrew Burt
    Citation: Carbon Balance and Management 2018 13:10
    Content type: Research Published on: