ABSTRACT
Being the largest economic hub in the country with continuous influx of population, Tokyo faces urban development challenges that are shared with many other rapidly growing cities. Implementing climate change mitigation measures while providing socio-economic opportunities is one of them, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) has taken an innovative approach to tackle this challenge by introducing a mandatory cap-and-trade and emission reporting scheme. Large business facilities have expressed that the TMG's policy was a catalyst to start business-wide energy conservation and accumulate knowledge in ways to reduce energy use. At the domestic level, the neighbouring prefecture of Saitama approached the TMG directly to learn from their policy and adapted the design for their local needs, implementing their own voluntary cap-and-trade scheme in 2011 granting national offset credits (J-VER), which are not tradable in Tokyo's scheme. The TMG's case also presented a conceptual evolution that the building-based approach enables an evidence-based planning and control of GHG emission using local inventories.
