Greenhouse Gas Inventories Tracking

GHG’s–such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and fluorinated gases–trap heat in the atmosphere. The heat being trapped in the atmosphere causes climate changes like hotter days, severe wildfires, flooding, drought, and sea-level rise. GHGs are emitted by a wide variety of sources, including but not limited to:

• Generating power at power plants or when burning natural gas at home
• Driving vehicles and other forms of transportation that use fossil fuels
• Processing and disposing of solid waste and wastewater

Because of their warming effect over a long period of time, reducing GHG emissions now is essential to address climate change.

LASAN tracks Los Angeles’ GHG emissions each year through the creation of GHG inventories, tools that assess how many GHGs were emitted in a given year. We compile two inventories: a Municipal Inventory and a Community Inventory. 

Our Municipal Inventory tracks GHG emissions from the City of Los Angeles’ operations as a local government, and our Community Inventory tracks GHG emissions from Los Angeles’ City-wide activity. 

We track community GHG emissions to give an overall-picture of Los Angeles’ GHG emissions, and we track municipal GHG emissions because the City is directly responsible for them through our operations to keep the City running. You can think of municipal GHG emissions as being a piece of the overall community GHG emissions of Los Angeles. 

These inventories provide transparency on how the City doing to reduce GHG emissions and to inform actions to reduce GHG emissions. We follow standard protocols for both of these inventories. Please note that because of when data becomes available for Los Angeles's many sources of GHG emissions, the most recent inventories are for the 2024 calendar year. After internally reviewing the inventories, we report to the City Council annually to finalize them.

The City created the following targets for municipal GHG emissions:

• A 55% reduction by 2025
• A 65% reduction by 2035
• Carbon neutrality by 2045

It also created the following targets for community GHG emissions:

• A 50% reduction by 2025
• A 73% reduction by 2035
• Carbon neutrality by 2050

Our Municipal Inventory measures things like Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) power generation, electricity and natural gas used at municipal buildings, municipal vehicles, and wastewater and landfill operations. We compare the City’s municipal GHG emissions to a baseline year of 2008 to see how much of a change in GHG emissions there are:

• The City has reduced its municipal GHG emissions in 2024 by 44% since 2008. This is behind the 2025 55% reduction goal.
• When we additionally include the GHG emissions from LADWP’s purchased power generation, this method shows the City has reduced its municipal GHG emissions in 2024 by 61% since 2008. This is ahead of the 2025 55% reduction goal.

We measure municipal GHG emissions in two ways to show them from two different but complementary perspectives. The first way shows what the City has the most control over while the second way shows all of LADWP’s energy, which is also important information for us to know.

Our Community Inventory includes power generation at a variety of facilities, community-wide transportation, and waste processing and disposal. We compare the City’s community GHG emissions to a baseline year of 1990 to see how much of a change in GHG emissions there are:

• The City has reduced its community GHG emissions in 2024 by 31% since 1990. This is below the 2025 50% reduction goal.

We also measure GHG emissions from sources like industrial product use and land use to supplement our goal tracking.

For more information, you can find our City of Los Angeles 2024 Municipal Inventory Report and 2024 Community Inventory Report below, where we discuss our findings in detail.

LASAN has multiple programs that include work to reduce the GHGs emitted by the City. Examples include promoting clean fuel usage in our refuse collection fleet, hosting the Los Angeles Clean Cities Coalition, organics diversion, landfill gas collection and processing, and reductions in wastewater GHG emissions through projects like the Terminal Island Renewable Energy project or the Hyperion Digester Gas Utilization Project.

Together, we can reduce Los Angeles' GHG emissions, and Angelenos play an important part. The following can all reduce your GHG footprint:

• Conserve electricity.
• Use alternative forms of transportation like public transportation, cycling, walking, or, when you need to replace a vehicle, choose a hybrid or electric car.
• Reduce the waste you generate.
• Use the blue bins for recycling and the green bins for organic waste. You can refer to our SORT LA app for guidance on which bin to use for certain items.

If you have any questions on how the City tracks our GHG emissions, our inventories, technical information and data requests, prior reports, or anything else relevant to our program, please contact us at the following email address:

san.climateaction@lacity.org

We look forward to hearing from you!