Analyzing Inceptive Municipal Efforts to Achieve Carbon Neutrality by 2050 in Boston
In 2017, Mayor Martin J. Walsh fortified existing GHG (short for greenhouse gas) emissions reduction goals to achieve carbon neutrality (no net carbon emissions released into the atmosphere) by the year 2050 in the City of Boston. This research paper aims to analyse the significance of the changes in GHG emissions generated by municipal operations in the City of Boston from the year 2005 to 2018. The City had pledged in the year 2000, when it enlisted itself in the Cities for Climate Protection Campaign of ICLEI (Local Governments for Sustainability) network, to take an active, leading role in advancing climate action. Therefore, a statistical examination of the local government’s progress of combating global warming would help us benchmark their successes against claims laid out in updated versions of the Climate Action Plan (CAP) and other documents. To test these claims, the main tools used were hypothesis testing, general linear models, including ANCOVA, and an Autoregressive model, assuming an Autoregressive (Lag 1) correlation structure. The results obtained from my methods and EDA were largely different from the statistics reported in the CAP and Boston GHG Inventory reports, with major trends of Yearly GHG Emissions differing among the Fuels, Departments, and Facilities groups.