Far too many cities around the world do not have the right data on how many emissions the city produces, where they are coming from, who the biggest energy users are or how many cars are on the road. This “data drought” is preventing them from meeting the targets of the Paris Agreement, according to the World Resources Initiative (WRI).

To overcome this, cities need open and free activity data, which WRI defines as data on energy use, transport fuel, vehicle miles travelled, waste, agriculture, land use, industry and more. What’s more, these figures need to be at the city level and not national or regional figures, which are hard to translate into city-level activity data.

To this end, cities, civil society groups and other subnational bodies are calling for national governments and utilities to make more data publicly available, explains WRI. Only then will they be able to effectively determine which activities have the largest impact on reducing citywide emissions and track their progress accordingly.