THE Paris Climate Conference was remarkable on several fronts. In addition to the agreement’s movement towards a new, ‘bottom-up’ style of goal-setting, the conference embraced action from cities, regions, companies, investors, and civil society organizations at an unprecedented scale. On 4 December 2015, over 400 mayors, representing more than 650 million people, spoke out in support of climate action at the Summit for Local Leaders.¹ Nearly 5,000 companies, hailing from more than 88 countries, and representing over $38 trillion USD in revenue, have pledged to mitigate their emissions, support adaptation efforts, or finance climate action.² As these efforts continue to grow, efforts to understand and quantify their contributions to climate adaptation, mitigation, and finance are increasingly vital.

Data and analysis will play a central role in ensuring the successful implementation of climate action from sub-national (i.e., state and region) and non-state (i.e., business, investor, and civil society organization) actors. These commitments could help fill the gap between the mitigation the world needs to prevent the most devastating impacts of global warming, and the actions countries have pledged. As part of the Paris Climate Conference, countries submitted post-2020 climate action plans, or Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). While they represent an increase in global ambition, these plans still leave a 12 gigaton gap – slightly more than China’s 2012 emissions³ – between the action that has been pledged, and the action scientists deem necessary to keep the world on a safe warming trajectory.⁴

Climate action from cities, regions, the private sector and civil society could help countries meet their existing targets, and help fill in this mitigation gap. However, sub-national and non-state commitments are only now beginning to be closely analyzed, and the level of funding, planning and resources dedicated to ensuring their implementation varies widely.⁵ Measuring their progress will be vital to ensuring an accurate and realistic picture of their ability to contribute to national and global climate goals.

 

Efforts to understand the sub-national and non-state climate actions can be explored from three angles: (i) The global mobilization of sub-national and non-state actors, and the common themes, trends and aggregate impact of their commitments; (ii) The degree of horizontal integration, or alignment between peer networks of cities, states, companies, investors and civil society organizations; and (iii) The level of vertical integration, or alignment between local, regional, and national climate action frameworks. More accurately understanding non-state and sub-national climate action from all of these angles is crucial to ensuring the successful implementation and growth of this promising array of pledges and commitments.

 

The scope of sub-national and non-state climate action can be assessed in terms of both the profile of its participating actors, and the content of their mitigation, adaptation, or finance commitments. A growing body of recent research has characterized and quantified the emissions impact of commitments from different repositories of sub-national and non-state climate actions.⁶ The Non-State Actor Zone for Climate Action (or NAZCA platform) represents the largest current collection of these commitments, synthesizing over 11,000 commitments to climate action contributed by seven different data providers. Launched at COP20 in December 2014, the platform highlights the extent of climate action occurring voluntarily, outside of national governments.

The participation captured by the NAZCA platform tells an encouraging story. A recent analysis of the platform’s contents found that NAZCA includes cities and regions representing 17 per cent of the global population, along with nearly two-thirds (61 per cent) of the 500 companies with the world’s largest market capitalizations.^7,8 Sixty-one per cent of the companies listed on NAZCA are members of the world’s largest public companies,⁹ representing approximately $19.2 trillion USD in revenue. The platform also includes 15 of the 20 banks with the world’s largest market capitalization.¹⁰

 

While this overall level of engagement tells a positive story about the broad scope of climate action and the growing leadership of key cities, companies, and organizations, some gaps remain. In terms of its representation of climate action specific to India, NAZCA includes 29 climate commitments from 14 Indian cities and regions, focused on renewable energy, energy efficiency, and resilience. Globally, renewable energy and energy efficiency also emerge as the most common themes in city and regional climate action. Together, these cities and regions represent approximately 28 million people, or just over 2 per cent of India’s population of 1.2 billion. Approximately 18 per cent of the Indian companies ranked among the world’s largest public companies (10 of the 54 Indian companies on the Forbes 2000) are currently included on NAZCA, representing over $500 million USD in annual revenue. While significant, the activity currently captured by NAZCA falls far short of capturing the full scope of climate action currently underway in India, mirroring data gaps across the broader landscape of non-state and sub-national action.

Efforts to collect and understand sub-national and non-state climate action currently focus on mitigation activities taking place in the Global North. They offer a less complete picture of commitments targeting adaptation and resilience, and fail to capture the full scale of climate action in developing and emerging economies. In part, this reflects the challenge of capturing climate action that is often categorized under another label. Efforts to install a bus rapid transit system, for instance, might be classified as development activities, rather than as mitigation strategies, reflecting the priorities of the governments implementing this work. Governments may also lack the funding or capacity to implement or monitor climate actions. Finding better ways to account for the synergy between sustainable development and climate action will help identify successful strategies and support the broader adoption of these activities.

 

Even when a climate commitment is captured completely by the platform, research to contextualize it is key to understanding its ability to generate meaningful greenhouse gas reductions. For instance, though NAZCA includes 15 of the world’s 20 largest banks, these institutions’ commitments target the footprints of their operations, rather than the more significant emissions embedded in their investment decisions.¹¹ Emissions reduction targets from companies and investors range from a low of 0.3 per cent, pledged by a utilities company, to the Danish Lego Group’s commitment to cut hundred per cent of its operational emissions through renewable energy procurement.¹² Across sectors, average mitigation reduction targets span goals of 31.7 per cent to 14.4 per cent.¹³

Horizontal integration, or the coordination between peer networks of climate action, plays a pivotal role in contextualizing and clarifying sub-national and non-state climate action. At the moment, data providers and climate actors apply different approaches to framing their commitments. Reporting requirements also vary widely, and comparing or aggregating the data from such heterogeneous systems is difficult. The sheer number of climate action networks and types of commitments risk overwhelming would-be climate action participants and the public. Working towards the harmonization of commitment frameworks between different networks would enable a clearer assessment of the impact of different types of commitments. A more cohesive framework for climate action would make the landscape of climate action more legible, making it easier to identify leaders and laggards within and across key high emitting sectors.

 

Vertical integration describes the coordination between different scales of government, to leverage their respective strengths in order to produce more effective climate action.¹⁴ Aligning city, state, regional, and national climate action planning and reporting helps create synergies to help drive climate action forward. For instance, cities and regions are well positioned to pilot new policies, which national governments can then scale up to meet their mitigation targets. A Yale University report investigated the mitigation potential of scaling nine innovative local or regional climate actions to the national level, finding that this process could cut 2020 carbon emission by 1.09 gigatons, narrowing the emissions gap by approximately 10 per cent.¹⁵

As countries prepare to ‘ratchet up’ the ambition of their climate action plans in the five year cycles articulated in the Paris Climate Agreement, sub-national and non-state climate action could help identify new strategies for achieving national goals. Sub-national governments also benefit from these partnerships, as national governments can help build capacity to implement and develop mitigation and adaptation strategies by supplying financial, technical, and other forms of support. Merging sub-national governments’ ability to pilot new solutions with the resources and scale of impact national governments could help drive climate action forward at both levels.

 

Understanding the degree of alignment between different levels of climate action is also crucial to avoiding double counting (i.e., accounting for a city’s emission reductions twice, once on behalf of the city and once on behalf of a country’s climate target). Establishing an accurate sense of sub-national and non-state contributions to national goals helps avoid overestimating the impact of these contributions. While sub-national and non-state activities can help spur and complement climate action, national leadership will still be essential to meeting global goals.

 

Footnotes:

1. Climate Summit for Local Leaders, Statement on the Climate Summit for Local Leaders by Anne Hidalgo, 2015. Retrieved from: http://climatesummitlocalleaders.paris/content/uploads/sites/16/2015/12/Anne-Hidalgo-and-Michael-Bloomberg.pdf.

2. A. Hsu, Y. Cheng, K. Xu, A. Weinfurter, C. Yick, M. Ivanenko, S. Nair, T. Hale, (Oxford), B. Guy (NRDC) and C. Rosengarten. Assessing the Wider World of Non-state and Sub-national Climate Action. Yale Data­Driven Environmental Solutions Group. Retrieved from: http://datadriven.yale.edu/2015/12/10/assessing-the-wider-world-of-non-state-and-sub-national-climate-action/.

3. World Resources Institute, CAIT Climate Data Explorer. Historical Emissions. Accessed March 2016. Retrieved from: http://cait.wri. org/historical.

4. United Nations Environment Programme, The Emissions Gap Report, 2015. Retrieved from: http://uneplive.unep. org/media/docs/theme/13/EGR_ 2015_ 301115_lores.pdf.

5. Galvanizing the Groundswell of Climate Actions Coalition. Lima-Paris Action Agenda Independent Assessment Report, 2015. Retrieved from: http://www.climate grounds well.org/blog-test/lpaa/report

6. Including, but not limited, to: (1) A. Hsu, A.S. Moffat, A.J., Weinfurter and J.D. Schwartz, ‘Towards a New Climate Diplomacy’, Nature Climate Change 5, 2015, pp. 501-503. (2) United Nations Environment Programme, Climate Commitments of Sub- national Actors and Businesses: A Quantitative Estimate of their Emission Reduction Impact, 2015. (3) PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, Climate Action Outside the UNFCCC, 2015. (4) Ecofys and University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, Better Partnerships: Understanding and Increasing the Impact of Private Sector Cooperative Initiative, 2015. (5) The New Climate Economy, Partnerships for Better Growth and a Better Climate, 2015. Retrieved from: http://2015.newclimateeconomy.report/.

7. A. Hsu, Y. Cheng, K. Xu, A. Weinfurter and C. Yick, State of Play: Contextualizing Non-State and Sub-National Actors Climate Pledges Through NAZCA and the LPAA, 2015. Retrieved from: http://datadriven.yale.edu/2015/11/26/analyzing-non-state-and-sub-national-climate-pledges-in-nazca-and-the-lpaa/.

8. CDP Global 500 Emissions and Response Status, 2013. Retrieved from: https://data. cdp.net/Climate-Change/Global-500- 8 Emissions-and-Response-Status-2013/marp-zazk.

9. Forbes, The Global 2000: The World’s Biggest Public Companies, 2015. Retrieved from:http://www.forbes.com/global2000/http://www.forbes.com/global2000/

10. A. Hsu, et al., Analyzing Non-State and Sub-National Climate Pledges in NAZCA and the LPAA, 2015. Retrieved from:http://datadriven.yale.edu/2015/11/26/analyzing-non-state-and-sub-national-climate-pledges-in-nazca-and-the-lpaa/http://datadriven. yale.edu/2015/11/26/analyzing-non-state-and-sub-national-climate-pledges-in-nazca-and-the-lpaa/

11. A. Hsu, Y. Cheng, K. Xu, A. Weinfurter and C. Yick, op. cit., 2015, fn. 7.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. D. Broekhoff, P. Erickson and C.M. Lee, What Cities do Best: Piecing Together an Efficient Global Climate Governance. Stockholm Environment Institute Working Paper 2015-15.

15. A. Hsu, et al., Scaling Up: From Local to Global Climate Action. Yale University, R20 Regions of Climate Action, The Stanley Foundation, and USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy, 2015. Retrieved from:http://regions20.org/images/ScalingUp.pdfhttp://regions20.org/images/ScalingUp.pdf.