ABSTRACT Cities and communities play important roles in sustainable development and climate change mitigation. This study presents a novel framework for developing carbon‐neutral visions for cities and communities. We established five “principles,” investigated options encompassing four parameters (management, goal setting, actions, and quantification), and introduced more detailed and technical “criteria” based on these principles. The five identified principles were that the framework should be universal, goal‐oriented, and implementable, and should have an appropriate spatial scale and encourage stakeholders. Then we draw recommendations based on the principles and criteria. We recommended, for example, not targeting consumption‐based emissions, that is, the Scope 3 emissions, because of limited information, differences in local government enforcement, and inconsistency across regions. However, resolving these issues can facilitate sustainable development in cities and communities. We applied the recommended method in Okuma Town, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. Our study bridges the gap between the reality of local actions and the need to mitigate climate change at the global scale.
Gomi et al. (Sun,) studied this question.