Towards Dynamic Carbon Management: A Structured Analytical Review and Multi-Scale Framework for Urban Carbon Accounting

As cities increasingly become central arenas for achieving climate mitigation and carbon neutrality targets, the capacity to actively manage urban carbon rather than merely quantify emissions has emerged as a critical challenge for urban planning, design, and environmental governance. Despite substantial advances in quantifying urban emissions, existing studies frequently exhibit fragmented treatment of urban carbon processes, limited coupling across spatial scales, and insufficient integration of carbon storage and sequestration mechanisms, particularly those associated with nature-based solutions. These limitations constrain the capacity of urban planning and design to engage with carbon as a dynamic and spatially embedded urban system. This study aims to address these challenges through a structured analytical review of urban carbon research, employing an adapted PRISMA-informed protocol combined with process- oriented and scale-sensitive coding to systematically examine how carbon generation, accounting, storage, sequestration, and mitigation are conceptualised and operationalised in the literature. Comparative synthesis of the reviewed literature reveals persistent methodological and conceptual patterns, including the dominance of emission-centric accounting logics, the marginalisation of ecological and biogenic carbon processes, weak cross-scale integration between buildings and urban systems, and a prevailing reliance on static representations of carbon dynamics. Building on this analytical synthesis, the paper introduces Dynamic Carbon Management (DCM) as a conceptual framework that reframes urban carbon as an integrated, multi-process, and multi-scale system requiring coordinated management rather than isolated accounting. DCM framework formally links carbon flows across buildings, urban form, and nature-based interventions, providing an operational logic for understanding interactions between carbon generation, mitigation, storage, and sequestration over time. By shifting the analytical focus from static inventories toward dynamic management perspectives, this study contributes a theoretically grounded framework that advances urban carbon research and establishes a foundation for future empirical validation, modelling efforts, and policy-oriented applications aimed at supporting more adaptive, integrated, and multi-scale urban decarbonisation strategies.