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The current and increasingly intensive technocratic drift recognises the indiscriminate power of techniques in solving several problems, including the struggle against climate change and its impact on cities. One of the future challenges concerns the effective and conscious application of KETs for the creation of smart environments in historical heritage, which plays a strategic role for its conservative values, but also in the broader strategy for limiting greenhouse gas emissions. The proposed paper reports some preliminary results of a research aimed at investigating and acknowledging these technologies as an enabling medium to undertake more informed deterministic choices in the field of CH. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Waste diversion targets are a common characteristic of municipal climate change mitigation plans because about two-thirds of residential waste sent to landfills is degradable and thus contributes to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This paper focuses on the challenge of achieving waste diversion targets in multi-residential buildings because their diversion rates are much lower than those for single-family homes. A case study of 15 high-rise condominium and cooperative housing buildings compares modes of governance by the City of Toronto and by multi-residential buildings to address waste diversion challenges. City responses to the challenges included mandatory building standards making waste diversion as convenient as garbage disposal, voluntary standards for in-suite storage of recyclables and organics, phase-in of organics collection and pay-as-you-throw collection fees, and delivery of promotion and education programs. For buildings, the responses were fines for poor-quality sorting, conversion of the garbage chute to an organics chute, the delivery of education material to residents, and monitoring bin capacity. Despite these initiatives, Toronto is very unlikely to meet its target of diverting 70% of residential waste away from disposal in landfill by 2030. Seven actions are recommended to increase the rate of diversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although many municipalities have climate action plans with targets and goals, effective climate action still faces significant implementation gaps. Implementation can falter due to barriers for the deployment of low-carbon solutions, as well as the lack of cultural, systemic, and psychological support for such solutions. Cultural drivers and perceptions shape citizens' behaviors and can perpetuate carbon-intensive lifestyles. This paper focuses on measures in climate action planning in the Metro Vancouver region of Canada regarding transportation, which remains the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions and has a low chance of reaching its emissions-reductions targets. Shifting towards greater sustainability will entail a challenge of transformative change, involving shifts in systems, behaviors, worldviews, and cultures. In implementation, the full complexity of the climate action challenge becomes most evident. A scoping review of climate action documentation and semi-structured interviews are used to examine (1) barriers to effective implementation, (2) socio-cultural perceptions and approaches to public engagement and (3) novel areas for transformational action. The study found a need to reweight the focus of climate action, which is predominantly set on techno-managerial efforts, also to include communication, narratives and broader systems change, which are the key barriers to low-carbon urban mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The realization of national climate change commitments, as agreed through international negotiations, requires local action. However, data is still insufficient to make accurate statements about the scale of urban emissions (UNHABITAT, 2011). The need of comparable emission inventories at city level, including smaller cities, is widely recognized to develop evidence-based policies accounting for the relation between emissions and institutional, socio-economic and demographic characteristics at city level. This paper presents a collection of harmonized greenhouse gases (GHG) emission inventories (the "CoM sample 2013") at municipal level directly computed by the cities and towns that participate in the EU Covenant of Mayors initiative. This is the mainstream European movement of local and regional authorities who voluntarily commit to reduce GHG emissions by 20% or more by 2020. The "CoM sample 2013" (http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/com/data/index.php? SECURE=123, doi:10.2904/EDGARcom2013) has been carefully checked to ensure its internal consistency and its congruity with respect to internationally accepted guide values for emission factors. Overall, it provides valuable data for the analysis of the heterogeneity of final energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions of cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]