global climate action from cities, regions, and businesses yale

2015), but the French government became an enthusiastic supporter of sub/nonstate climate action. France had not been significantly involved in TCG prior to this time (Roger et al. Following Lima, they were joined in this effort by the incoming French COP presidency. It is no surprise, then, that following the adoption of the Paris Agreement, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres hailed the “tsunami” of bottom-up climate action from the podium as a driver of the successful outcome.ĭespite this setback, the UNFCCC, UNSG, and Peruvian presidency were eager to continue the strategy of mobilizing climate action beyond the UNFCCC process and leveraging such action to push countries closer to a deal in Paris. And a variety of studies released in the lead-up to COP 21, looking only at a handful of the initiatives that bring together cities, companies, and other such actors, found their mitigation potential to be in the range of 2.5–4 billion tons of CO 2 by 2020, more than India emits in a year, and similar in magnitude to the 4–6 billion tons the UN projects the national pledges adopted in Paris will cut by 2030, a decade later (for a summary, see GGCA 2015, 12–13). A study released at Paris found climate commitments from “over 7,000 cities from more than 99 countries, with a combined population of 794 million (11 percent of the global population) and around 32 percent of global GDP,” as well as “close to 5,000 companies from over 88 countries representing over $38 trillion USD in revenue” (Hsu et al. The trend sharply accelerated and received enhanced attention around COP 21. A groundswell of action on climate change from these transnational actors has been building in recent decades, as cities, companies, and other actors increasingly take climate actions on their own, in cross-border networks with peers around the world, and, often, in partnership with states and international organizations (Bulkeley et al. Alongside these changes in the intergovernmental process, and perhaps even more radically, the new catalytic regime aims to bring cities and subnational governments, businesses, and other nonstate actors into its very core.

Global climate action from cities, regions, and businesses yale