Testing the efficacy of voluntary urban greenhouse gas emissions inventories

Abstract

Abstract:Drawing from an original dataset of urban metropolitan carbon footprints, in this paper we explore the correlations between national level climate change commitments and sub-national level inventories. We ask: Does ambitiousness in commitment have an impact on performance in footprint reduction? Does having long-term commitments affect performance in footprint reduction? Do binding national level commitments (such as those under the Kyoto Protocol) affect performance at the city level in terms of footprint reduction? To provide answers, we synthesize data from the largest repository of voluntary subnational commitments and actions towards footprint reduction and greenhouse gas inventories from around the world, the Carbonn platform. More than 500 cities report at least one action, commitment or inventory to this database. We find, using a subset of this database, perhaps counter intuitively that cities with more ambitious commitments do not necessarily have steeper reductions in emissions. Our data also suggests that having long-term self-reported goals did not make the cities perform better in terms of footprint reduction. This appeared to be true for both government and community commitments reported. Lastly, and positively, our data did reveal a statistically significant effect for cities belonging to countries that had committed to the Kyoto Protocol, suggesting the necessity of binding national (and supranational) climate targets.

Beyond national climate action: the impact of region, city, and business commitments on global greenhouse gas emissions

“…To date there are limited assessments of NSA climate action implementation, and those that do exist are limited in sample size (e.g. Khan and Sovacool (2016) evaluate 25 cities' emissions reductions reported to Carbonn® Climate Registry) or by sector (e.g. Steffen et al (2019) evaluate the impact of transnational municipal networks on city investment in utility-scale solar photovoltaics).…”

ClimActor, harmonized transnational data on climate network participation by city and regional governments

“…Further complicating the aggregation and estimation of these actors’ contributions to global climate mitigation is the difficulty in determining overlaps between actors: city governments embedded within states often commit their own climate actions without coordinating with higher levels of jurisdictions, which could result in double counting of emissions reductions or other activities if not appropriately accounted for 14 , 16 , 17 . Due to these challenges, most studies evaluating subnational climate actions are focused on a small number of cities with available data 18 , 19 or localized to a specific region 20 .…”

Pre-2020 action: trends, progress and urgency

“…31 Analyses of the actual performance of non-state actor actions (as opposed to simply analysing the targets, in the assumption that they will be met) are emerging, but remain limited in number (see, for example, Khan and Sovacool, 2016). Additional emission reductions that could potentially be achieved by non-state actors, should they receive support from national governments, have not been studied to date.…”

“…Studies on the actual performance of non-state actors in meeting their voluntarily set targets (not only analysing the targets themselves) are emerging, but are very limited in number (for example Khan and Sovacool, 2016). Moreover, to the authors' knowledge, additional reductions that can potentially be delivered by initiatives through supporting measures by national governments have not been studied to date.…”