Our approach to generating emissions projections, and so also estimating the impact of emissions reducing policies, is a top-down method that is sensible for regional economies. By top-down we mean that the average performance, in terms of annual resource consumption, of a single unit of land use is representative, with variations within that land use category being insignificant at a large enough scale.

Core to our assumptions is that the city will grow or change irrespective of any policy decisions in the scope of the analysis. This is not just a simplifying assumption, but allows policy decisions to be compared like-for-like.

This section explains our method for estimating future emissions and hence the depletion of a carbon budget, how interventions are encoded within this framework and the specific assumptions made for each intervention area.