Four major questions have informed the Global Change and Local Places research agenda from its inception:

• How do the dynamics of greenhouse gas emissions and their driving forces differ at local scale?

• Can localities reduce their source contributions to global climate change?

• How and where does scale matter? and

• How can the capacity to study global change in localities be improved?

The project's major findings, insights, and lessons can be cast as answers to these four key questions and as three major observations regarding the ways the global and the local relate to each other, stated as variants of the familiar slogan Think globally and act locally.

How do the dynamics of greenhouse gas emissions and their driving forces differ at local scale?

The importance of attention to local scale lies not in uncovering differences in descriptions of greenhouse gas emissions by major categories, but in details that are often lost in larger aggregations. The details in question are often critical to designing effective mitigation strategies.

Overall, 1990 greenhouse gas emissions for the four study areas are significantly, but not greatly, different from global, national, and their respective state level emissions (Chapter 7). Local emissions differ moderately in the mix of greenhouse gases, somewhat more so in sources, and considerably more in total per capita and per square kilometer emissions. Carbon dioxide dominates the mix of greenhouse gases at our sites as it does nationally (Table 7.3).