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Although several central and local governments around the world have set long term low-carbon targets, they do not always have concrete plans toward the goals. In order to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emission significantly, various kinds of measures in various sectors will be required. Some measures reduce GHG emissions directly and are called “direct measures” in this study. To implement those direct measures by the target year, indirect measures are also required, such as economic incentives, regulations, and urban planning. This study proposes a method to develop a concrete long-term schedule of direct and indirect measures, a “roadmap,” based on the idea of backcasting. To formulate the implementation of and relations between measures, and to estimate the concrete schedule to achieve the targets, we developed a model called “backcasting tool” (BCT). Given the information of measures including GHG emission reduction by measures, required resource input and maximum total resource input, and so on, BCT estimates the progress of the measures from the current to the target year. The method was applied in Kyoto City with a low-carbon target, 40% reduction in CO2 emission from fossil fuel by 2030 compared with 1990. Using BCT, we showed that a detailed schedule consists of about 100 measures classified into six fields. The result shows it is possible to achieve the target if all the measures, both direct and indirect, are implemented in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]