Removing Barriers for Climate Action Planning: Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Planning Tools for Regional and Local Governments in Minnesota 

Abstract
The Metropolitan Council has created technical resources to support local governments' consideration of climate crisis mitigation around land-use and transportation.

Regional and local governments in Minnesota are increasingly more interested in finding pathways to decarbonize the transportation sector to address concerns about the climate crisis. Few technical resources are specific to Minnesota communities and explore the linkage between land-use and transportation to reduce emissions.

The Metropolitan Council is the regional government of the Twin Cities region. Serving more than 180 communities in seven counties, the Metropolitan Council has developed technical resources such as a regional and local government greenhouse gas inventory tool that applies modern techniques to quantify Vehicles Miles Traveled based on origin and destination of communities and using large data sets such as Location-Based Services from Streetlight Data. The greenhouse gas inventory tool will be available to the public through the Metropolitan Council website starting April of 2020, as a user-friendly web-based interface.

The Metropolitan Council is also developing, in partnership with the Sustainable Healthy Cities Network, ICLEI USA, and the University of Minnesota, a land-use and transportation greenhouse gas mitigation strategies scenario planning tool. The goal of this scenario planning tool is to allow Minnesota metropolitan area communities to evaluate the impact of different decarbonization strategies such as compact development, public transit, emerging technologies, and cross-sectoral solutions. While the tool will be released by the Summer of 2021, we will show results from our extensive external stakeholder engagement process, showing what are the strategies of interest for communities in Minnesota.

Local and regional governments play an important role in climate crisis mitigation. Greenhouse gas accounting, forecasting, and scenario planning can be an overwhelming effort, particularly for small-size communities. Technical resources oriented toward planners and sustainability officials are crucial to speed-up climate action and promote data-driven decision making.