Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The 2019 GHG Inventory established a new baseline year (2019) to serve for measuring progress on the City’s Sustainability goals in which 1,809,332 metric tons of CO2e were emitted. Between 2019 and 2023, the City had achieved a 1.64% reduction in community GHG emissions and a 3.2% increase in GHG emissions from government operations.

The 2020 GHG Inventory reveals a marked decrease in greenhouse gas emissions since the 2019 report due to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since 2021, the City began tracking and counting carbon sequestrations from urban forests as negative CO2e emissions. The 2022 and 2023 GHG Inventory(PDF, 4MB) provides updated data on emissions and reflects the City's ongoing efforts toward refining the way it measures and calculates emissions and in reducing its carbon footprint.

Updates to community inventory

  • 2019, 2020 and 2021 baseline community emissions have been updated to account for carbon sequestration from urban forests.
  • Since 2021, the City no longer received industrial energy natural gas usage data from TECO Peoples Gas. Thus, these emissions weren’t included in the 2022 and 2023 community inventories.

Updates to government inventory

  • Employee commute VMT has been recalculated in preparing the 2022 and 2023 government inventories to more accurately capture the distances our employees commute to and from work. Thus, this updated methodology has been retroactively applied to previous years up until 2019, which is our baseline year, and those emissions have been updated as well.
  • Emissions from solid waste disposal in inventory reports for years prior to 2022 have been updated.

Key Findings

  • For the community inventory,
    • The top three emitting sectors in both years were Transportation and Mobile Sources (38% of total emissions), Commercial Energy (31%), and Residential Energy (22%).
    • Per capita emissions: Emissions decreased from 9.72 MTCO2e per person in 2019 to 9.41 MTCO2e per person in 2023.
  • For the government inventory,
    • The top three emitting sectors in both years were Water & Wastewater Treatment (38% in 2022 and 39% in 2023), Vehicle Fleet (22%), Employee Commute (15% in 2022 and 14% in 2023). 

Additional Resources

CDP: The City of Fort Lauderdale, along with major cities from around the world, regularly reports greenhouse gas emissions through the Carbon Disclosure Project CDP.

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