Measuring what matters to achieve climate targets

When is a city green' and when is it a big polluter? As we approach COP 31, when country leaders from around the world meet to negotiate climate policies and targets, knowing how and what cities need to measure has never been more important.

Becoming an environmentally friendly city, it turns out, is actually quite easy. On paper, that is. Earlier this year, a study in South Korea found that one of the countrys cities was both highly polluting and low carbon at the same time. This is because the city, which consists mainly of buildings and farms, is home to large power stations that send their electricity, and their emissions, far beyond its boundary. But if we count only the emissions the city government can actually manage, the total is modest.

If this city claims to be environmentally friendly, is it misleading? The figures may be accurate, but they tell only part of the story. This raises the question of how emissions should be measured in the first place, which is important because misleading claims, even unintentional ones, are a significant barrier to achieving climate targets. They obscure what is real and effective and derail consumers and policy makers. A 2020 European Commission study found that 53% of environmental claims examined in the EU were vague, misleading or unfounded, and that 40% were unsubstantiated. Without consistent agreement on what is measured and how, along with robust verification, it is difficult to know which initiatives are working and which are not.

This challenge is not unique to cities. The UNFCCC Global Stocktake, which informs the next round of climate action plans under the Paris Agreement, depends on reliable data and transparent reporting. If progress cannot be measured consistently, it becomes much harder to know whether climate policies are delivering the intended results.

It is also important for financing those initiatives. Climate targets are as much about economics as they are about the environment. Supply chains are being rebuilt around low-carbon production. Companies joining RE100, a global corporate commitment to run on 100% renewable electricity, pledge to choose locations where clean power and credible carbon accounting can be demonstrated. Investment generally follows when there is sufficient evidence that the initiative or organization is a sound choice.

However, there is no shortage of ways to measure and verify emissions claims. What is problematic is the sheer number of methodologies that exist. A technical report published by ISO this year, ISO/TR 37115-1 on net zero carbon city use cases, looked at 20 cities from 11 countries across 3 continents and found that virtually all of them were using their own unique way of assessing carbon emissions and reduction efforts. Beijings Energy Valley, for example, ties land supply to a system of 42 indicators. Marseille in France publishes a real-time greenhouse gas dashboard for its citizens. In China, Huzhou credits households through personal carbon accounts while Chengde counts forest carbon at 108 monitoring points. In South Korea, Busans Eco Delta Smart City runs on 28 performance indicators and a digital twin.

These initiatives highlight that cities often track different indicators, use different reporting frameworks and define success in different ways. Cities are as diverse as they are numerous so we can't expect cities to all be pursuing net-zero in the same manner. But if every city has its own bespoke system for measuring and verifying, comparing progress can be difficult. The challenge is how to create a common foundation that accommodates local differences.

A common foundation Around the world, cities are experimenting with ways to do just that. One example comes from Koreas carbon-neutral leading-city programme. Launched in 2024, it is now part of the Korea Green Transformation (K-GX) strategy announced in October 2026. The programme spans four very different cities: Dangjin, an industrial port; Jeju, a tourism island already running on a high share of renewables; Boryeong, a coastal energy producer and Nowon, a dense residential district in Seoul. Given their differences, success indicators in the programme are purposely different as well but anchored in a common methodology for classifying and measuring emission-reducing activities, as well as for verifying the results. This means that results can be assessed in the same way and undergo third-party verification so that they can serve as a basis for future funding. Reductions that fail verification do not count when future budgets are set.

While the projects themselves are very different, the principle is consistent: local flexibility supported by a common foundation for measurement and verification. This is the same principle that underpins many international standards. Cities do not need identical solutions, but they do need a shared basis for defining, measuring and assessing progress.

The Korean programme did not have to start from scratch because many of the building blocks already exist in the form of international standards. ISO/IEC 21972, for example, provides an internationally agreed vocabulary for city indicators, helping ensure that cities and organizations are speaking the same language when collecting and communicating data. Many other standards support everything from greenhouse-gas accounting to city information modelling and digital twins, while IECQ, the IEC quality assessment system, independently verifies carbon footprint claims.

The challenge is not a lack of tools, it is helping cities identify which standards, frameworks and methodologies are most relevant to their particular circumstances while ensuring results remain measurable and comparable.

Cities are intrinsically complex, each with different priorities, geographies, industries and contexts. Which is why international collaborati

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