This week, thousands of leaders from cities, states, businesses, investors, and environmental organizations—including representatives from Google—will gather in San Francisco, CA at the Global Climate Action Summit to commit to raising the level of ambition in the fight against climate change. National governments around the world have committed to take action, but cities and businesses have an equally critical role to play in reaching a zero-carbon future. That's one reason we're excited about today's announcement of a new tool aimed at helping cities lower emissions.



Cities as diverse as New York, Berlin, Oslo, and Rio de Janeiro have committed to reducing their carbon footprint by 80 percent within the next 30 years. These cities rely on huge carbon data sets as a measuring stick to help identify where they may be able to cut emissions. But many cities lack the resources to gather data such as building emissions, making it hard for them to set firm carbon commitments of their own.

The Environmental Insights Explorer (EIE), a new online tool we created in collaboration with the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy (GCoM), is designed to make it easier for cities to access, and act upon, new climate-relevant datasets. By analyzing Google’s comprehensive global mapping data together with standard greenhouse gas (GHG) emission factors, EIE estimates city-scale building and transportation carbon emissions data, as well as renewable energy potential, leading to more globally-consistent baselines from which to build policies, guide solutions, and measure progress.