This note describes Carbon Monitor Cities 2.0, a new approach to near-real-time monitoring of city-level greenhouse gas emissions from various sectors without the need for local data collection. With support from the City Climate Finance Gap Fund, the World Bank piloted this approach for 11 cities in three middle-income countries: Egypt, South Africa, and Türkiye. The aim of the pilot was to demonstrate the ability to generate near-real-time data on local greenhouse gas emissions, which could allow a better understanding of the spatial and temporal patterns of urban carbon emissions in specific cities. This understanding could inform local climate change mitigation policies and investments, and also potentially be used as part of a monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) system for carbon finance in the future. As this approach does not rely on local data collection, it can be scaled up to a large number of cities relatively easily, particularly in low-and-middle-income countries that lack data.