Use Cases - Crosswalk Labs
How Crosswalk Works for You
City Planning01
With Crosswalk, you can focus on solutions to solve your city's climate-related problems by knowing what emissions look like day by day, block by block. Our data supports action: community inventories, climate planning and emissions tracking over time, space, and emitting sector. We show you the high-resolution emissions landscape of your city, neighborhood or campus.
Project Siting02
From clean energy companies that want to know where to site their next projects, to carbon capture projects that are looking for locations with specific atmospheric or other strategic requirements, Crosswalk data can provide the intel. Crosswalk enables powerful mapping and spatial analytics to help users identify opportunities, assess risk, understand climate realities, and enhance location context.
Investment Intelligence03
Crosswalk data can provide intelligence to guide investment for the private sector. Specifically, Crosswalk data can fill information gaps in emissions assessments for assets held and managed by large investment firms and trusts. For example, asset managers can use Crosswalk data to understand how emissions would be impacted by potential partnerships or acquisitions.
Health and Equity04
What if think tanks, journalists, and NGOs could use consistent data to drive effective policy change? Crosswalk emissions data can be aggregated by neighborhoods and layered with public health and demographic data to identify overlapping public health concerns and emissions hot spots.
Connecting Cities05
Regional collaborations in local government often struggle with a lack of apples-to-apples data for climate action. Crosswalk’s uniform methodology allows users to compare and contrast their emissions with others, speeding up the learning cycle and accelerating emissions reductions.
Trust-Based Advocacy06
What if communities competed to be the lowest emitters? What if elected officials could run on, and then deliver, low-carbon policies for their communities? Crosswalk provides citizens, advocates, and media with reliable emissions data, verified against the atmosphere - so you know it is trustworthy.
Why Crosswalk
Increase Awareness
Get buy-in to prioritize climate action by effectively communicating emissions information in a way that is plain to see and easy to understand.
View your emissions data (daily)
View your emissions data, take action to reduce emissions, and track your progress over time.
Compare Cities
Learn what sustainable cities are doing to quantifiably reduce emissions, and connect with city leaders to put their insights to work for you.
Solve Converging Problems
Find opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while advancing priorities such as low-incoming housing, equity in health care, and transportation planning.
Crosswalk vs Status Quo
Crosswalk Labs has created spatially and temporally detailed estimates of fossil fuel CO2 emissions from all US cities using a methodology funded by NASA, NOAA and NIST.
Our products report for 50 states, 435 congressional districts, tribal lands, 3,000+ counties and 3,601 urban areas.
(typical)
Neighborhood level
Currently, cities estimate their emissions for the entire city and do not provide any information about emissions for individual neighborhoods, streets, buildings or other portions of a city.
Building scale
Crosswalk Labs provides census block level data in every corner of the country and has building-level and street-level emissions data for over a hundred cities and can work with you to add your city.
Temporal resolution
The status quo is annual emissions, often spaced several years apart due to limited resources. Crosswalk Labs data are available for every hour during every day since 2010.
Atmospheric check
The status quo inventories are not scientifically verified by measuring CO2 in the air. Crosswalk Labs emissions data are validated in peer-reviewed scientific studies that use measured CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere to estimate sources and sinks.
Comparison between cities
The status quo inventories often differ between cities in the sectors, the scopes, and the methods used, making inter-city comparisons difficult. Crosswalk Labs uses the same sector definitions, scopes, and methods across the entire country, making apples-to-apples comparisons between cities easy.
Peer reviewed / public data
Crosswalk Labs data have been developed through scientific research at several universities. The public data sources, methods, and results have been reviewed by experts and published in reputable scientific journals.
Accuracy
Most cities underestimate their emissions while some overestimate, resulting in estimates that are all over the map. Crosswalk data is compared with national measurements of a carbon isotope (C14) that is not found in coal, natural gas, or gasoline and so is a great way separating background CO2 from CO2 caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
Latency
Most city inventories are several years out of date by the time the data is assembled, the reports are written and published. Crosswalk data aggregation software downloads new data every night and updates to the emissions estimates are processed at least quarterly and we are constantly working to shorten that cycle further. Crosswalk Now-Cast uses our decade of data to inform our prediction algorithms, allowing us to estimate emissions in real time.
Consistency with EPA’s UNFCCC submission
Crosswalk Labs data are categorized in a way that allows for streamlined reporting for the EPA’s UNFCCC submission and several common city-level protocols.
Now-cast and limited forecasting
Crosswalk Labs data will be able to estimate today’s emissions and provide limited forecasting of emission into the future.
Incorporate remote sensing
Scope 2
Crosswalk Labs data include emissions associated with electricity consumption, reflecting the amount and location of consumption as opposed to electricity production. Emissions associated with electricity production vs. consumption are often conflated in self-reported inventories, and the numbers are often based on averages.
