Performance determinants show European cities are delivering on climate mitigation

Angel Hsu (), Jonas Tan, Yi Ming Ng, Wayne Toh, Regina Vanda and Nihit Goyal
Additional contact information
Angel Hsu: Yale-NUS College
Jonas Tan: Yale-NUS College
Yi Ming Ng: Yale-NUS College
Wayne Toh: Yale-NUS College
Regina Vanda: Yale-NUS College
Nihit Goyal: Yale-NUS College

Nature Climate Change, 2020, vol. 10, issue 11, 1015-1022

Abstract: Abstract Cities are crucial climate change actors, developing largely voluntary action plans and emission reduction targets. There is limited evidence, however, of their impact through transnational climate initiatives and little empirical support linking mitigation strategies and emissions reductions. Here, we show that 60% of more than 1,000 EU Covenant of Mayors’ cities are on track to achieve their 2020 emission reduction targets. Assessments of cities’ mitigation outcomes and the determinants of performance show that on-track cities tend to have less-ambitious targets and higher baseline emissions and are in countries with more-ambitious national climate policies and greater realized emissions reductions than cities that are not on track. Automated textual analysis and a regression model find city emissions reduction is influenced by plan-level, city-level and country-level characteristics. Greater emissions reductions are associated with plans targeting energy efficiency. These results of city-level achievement provide empirical support for the theorized subnational actors’ contribution to global climate mitigation.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0879-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcli:v:10:y:2020:i:11:d:10.1038_s41558-020-0879-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nclimate/

DOI: 10.1038/s41558-020-0879-9

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Climate Change is currently edited by Bronwyn Wake

More articles in Nature Climate Change from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().