- Cities contribute 70% of global carbon emissions while also facing climate-related impacts.
- Experts at the ongoing COP29 and urban leaders have advocated for stronger inclusion of subnational goals in the next Nationally Determined Contributions.
- Urban leaders are calling for increased public investment in funding cities to meet climate goals.
Cities are emerging as focal points for climate action at the ongoing climate negotiations in Baku. Cities are a source of 70% of global carbon emissions, making them key in tackling the impacts of climate change.
Currently, around 70% of the world’s cities are experiencing the impact of climate change. Climate-related extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, heat waves, and airborne diseases are increasingly affecting cities across the globe. By 2050, extreme weather events like floods and droughts will cost cities around $200 billion annually. This growing impact of climate change was shared at an event organised by the UN-Habitat at COP29 in Baku, where experts from the United Nations called for incorporating cities in future climate action.
Ahead of COP29, the UN-Habitat also published a report highlighting how the increasing extreme weather events damage fundamental urban and peri-urban infrastructure, ecosystems, and natural environments. These disasters disproportionally affect vulnerable communities living in cities, particularly people living in urban settlements, the poor, women, the elderly, and migrants.
Countries with varying levels of development face different vulnerabilities to climate disasters, with highly developed countries experiencing fewer impacts despite a similar number of climate-related events compared to developing or underdeveloped countries, highlights another study by international scientists, published earlier this year. The paper studied climate-related disasters between 2000 and 2020 and analysed 46,000 incidences.
“We are living in a time of compounding crisis,” said Shipra Narang Suri, Chief of the Urban Practice Branch, UN-Habitat, adding that cities are dealing with several crises connected to climate, energy, housing, cost of living, etc. These challenges will increase with the increase in urbanisation and population density in cities as estimates show that urban areas may triple by 2050, and around 2.5 billion more people will be living in cities by then.
Given this potential scenario, experts at the UN-Habitat event argue that the scope of mitigation and urgency of adaptation measures squarely place cities at the forefront of climate action.
Call for strong local climate action
The ongoing COP29 aims to build consensus over climate finance that will flow from developed to developing countries and will also set the stage for more ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate impacts. Countries are set to submit their third round of NDCs in 2025 and advocates such as Suri are pushing for a stronger role for local government bodies (at state, province, municipality level) in future NDCs. “We have to make sure that we do not miss this opportunity,” said Suri, highlighting the example of Brazil, which released its latest NDCs on November 11, the day COP29 began. Brazil’s new NDCs are anchored on collaboration between different spheres of government, she claimed.
As per an analysis, over 70% of NDCs have moderate or low urban content which refers to the inclusion of urban climate solutions in the NDCs. The joint analysis by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and UN-Habitat of urban content in the 194 NDCs held by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as of June 2023 reveals that 34% of NDCs analysed have low or no urban content. The data focussed on climate change mitigation and adaptation and among the NDCs analysed, 44% have both urban adaptation and mitigation, 11% focus on only urban adaptation and 10% only on urban mitigation.
Many cities are pledging to tackle climate change, but few have enough data or ambitious goals, according to another study by researchers from University of North Carolina and University of Berkeley published in One Earth journal. In G20 countries, notes the study, over 3,000 cities and 173 regions have made commitments to mitigate climate change which are largely voluntary. Yet only 40% have reported adequate data related to ambition and implementation, and over 60% are not achieving the reduction rates aligned with the 1.5-degree Celsius goal, claims the study.
In the recent months, India has also witnessed a growing number of cities releasing climate action plans (CAP), but these plans lack legal backing and so cities are not obliged to meet the goals.
The existing climate action in urban areas does not reflect the urgency of the threat posed by climate change, according to the UN-Habitat report released at COP29, “The world remains firmly on course to break the agreed ceiling of a 1.5-degree Celsius increase from pre-industrial levels. In part, this failure is the result of continued barriers to action at the local level: cities are still largely excluded from national and international decision-making around resilience building, and lack access to adequate levels of finance to take meaningful action themselves.”
Cathy Diam-Valla, Climate Change Technical Specialist at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), underscores that incorporating an urban component into NDCs involves convincing national governments of the importance of granular data and a territorial approach. She explains, “Breaking it down at the territorial level makes it much easier, even if complete data is unavailable. Certain sectors are inherently urban—for instance when you address transport in your NDC, you’re largely referring to cities. The same goes for energy efficiency. Specifying these details helps present implementable and investable NDCs more effectively.”
“Big cities are the larger contributors in overall emission, and well-designed CAPs are essential for translating national climate goals into concrete, actionable steps at the local level. And well-structured CAPs that align with NDCs can provide the roadmap for cities to meet national climate goals while addressing local vulnerabilities,” says Sarath Babu MG, an urban practitioner with the Climate Centre for Cities at the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA), an institute of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India.
Read more: Adaptation is key as India stares at GDP loss due to climate change
A call for increased finance
Any meaningful climate action at the sub-national level depends on finance, which is currently under negotiation at COP29, experts at the conference have said.
“We want cities to be ambitious. But without finance and action at the local level, where more than 70% of emissions occur, how will these emission reductions happen?” asks Ruth Zugman do Coutto, Chief of the Mitigation Branch, UN Climate Division.
A September report published by the Cities Climate Finance Leadership Alliance highlights the gap by saying that annual urban climate finance (UCF) must increase more than fivefold from the current $831 billion to align with a 1.5°C climate pathway. Of the $831 billion in urban finance flows in 2022, private finance accounted for 49%, while public finance accounted for 22%.
While there has been an increase in urban climate finance – by 54% since 2019/2020 and 117% since 2017/2018 – particularly in key mitigation sectors such as energy, transport, and building infrastructure, cities are still underfunded relative to their needs, says the report.
“Cities require an estimated $4.3 trillion annually from now until 2030, and over $6 trillion per year from 2031 to 2050 for climate mitigation alone,” the report stated, acknowledging that adaptation needs are more complex to project due to a lack of data.
Against this backdrop, urban leaders gathered in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, and called for at least $800 billion in annual public investment by 2030 from national governments and development finance institutions. These leaders, representing G20 countries, convened at the U20 Summit to influence the discussions of national leaders set to meet on November 18 and 19 in Brazil, the host of the 2024 G20 Summit and the 2025 climate COP30. As per a statement released on November 16, these urban leaders view the ongoing COP29 as a significant opportunity, with the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) on Climate Finance under negotiation. They are advocating for a significant portion of the new climate finance fund, that may be decided at COP29, to be allocated specifically to urban initiatives in developing countries.
The NCQG negotiation, however, has not seen much progress in the first week of COP29. All eyes are now on the crucial second week of talks to see if there is any breakthrough in the climate finance discussion and whether any share of it will be allocated for city-level action.
Banner image: Urban houses in Jodhpur, Rajasthan. Image by Vyacheslav Argenberg via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).
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