Predicting European Cities’ Climate Mitigation Performance using Machine Learning

Abstract

Although cities have risen to prominence as climate actors, emissions data scarcity has been the primary challenge to evaluating their performance. Here we develop a scalable, replicable machine learning methodology for evaluating the mitigation performance for nearly 50,000 local and municipal actors in the European Union from 2001–2018. We find that participation in one of the largest voluntary transnational climate initiatives is associated with a 1.6 percent reduction in annual emissions. Overall, these cities representing 301 million inhabitants have reduced nearly 186 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Compared to only 35 percent of external cities that have reduced emissions, 84 percent of cities participating in transnational climate governance have reduced emissions over the same time period. Participating cities reporting emissions data on average have higher annualized per capita reduction compared to cities without reported emissions. These findings provide quantitative evidence urban climate governance initiatives’ effect on global climate mitigation.

The increasing emission divide between cities of the Global North and Global South: Towards adjustable mitigation scenarios at the city level

“…Moran et al (2022) presented a new CO 2 emissions inventory for all 116,572 municipal and local-government units in Europe, containing 108,000 cities at the smallest scale used. Hsu et al (2022) assessed the mitigation performance of nearly 50,000 local and municipal actors in the European Union from 2001 to 2018.…”

“…However, mitigation measures have been adopted in wealthier Western countries in recent decades, and they have achieved incomparable progress compared with those elsewhere (Jabareen, 2015b). Hsu et al (2022) assessed the mitigation performances of nearly 50,000 local and municipal actors in the European Union from 2001 to 2018, reporting that 84% of cities participating in transnational climate governance reduced emissions over that period. On average, participating cities reporting emissions data have higher annualised per capita reduction than cities without reported emissions.…”

Aggregating the Impacts of Non-State and Subnational Climate Actions: An Exploration of Methods

“…In general, if data are not available, this may indicate that the action is not wellpositioned to be achieved (although it may not always be the case). A recent study of European cities participating in an international cooperative initiative concluded that cities that reported emissions information also reduced their emissions, while cities participating in the initiative but not reporting had no or minimal emissions reductions (Hsu et al 2022). Excluding actions where data are not available or are not highly reliable will reduce uncertainty in general but will also reduce the number of included actions and associated mitigation potential.…”