Increasingly, cities are home to a full spectrum of climate action — innovations in green retrofitting, and sustainable mobility; frameworks for ‘good growth,’ and resiliency planning; and battlegrounds for protest, and social upheaval over the current climate crisis. Where they go from here will help determine the larger international conversation around what the global community can do to keep temperatures below the infamous 1.5-degree Celsius threshold.

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Just by definition, cities should be leading the way on climate action. If the UN projections are correct — with two-thirds of the world’s population living in cities by 2050, and the brunt of carbon emissions coming from urban environments — then cities are where both the problems and solutions to combating climate change will naturally lie. But that has not been the accepted discourse since the rise of the environmental movement in the 1970s: sustainable development goals and strategies have largely focused on nation-states, not cities, to coordinate and implement global action. 

Regardless, cities have charted their own zero-carbon futures, through powerful multi-city alliances like C40 and ICLEI. But more recently, the onus on cities has gained a more profound traction, as the policy differences between nation-states and their cities have notably diverged. 

Take, for example, the United States. When President Donald Trump announced the country’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement in 2017, he remarked that he was “elected to represent Pittsburgh, not Paris.” Meanwhile, the Pittsburgh mayor said he would commit the city to the Paris goals, in opposition to the administration. This action was supplemented by countless local and state governments — and even some city transit agencies, like New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA)  — pledging to the agreement, thereby creating a splintered reality in one of the world’s highest-carbon-producing countries.

Either as complementing national policies or as an alternative in politically insidious contexts, institutional innovation is crucial in order to produce the several potential arrangements depending on contexts, actors involved, and challenges to be addressed.Yet the role that cities can play in tackling these goals require several conditions in order to push forward on some of the most pressing issues ahead of us. 

Most significant, perhaps, is power devolution, which should be at the forefront of any discussion on governance innovation — acting as the institutional backbone to harnessing the power of cities in adapting core practices to revert the current climate crisis. Decentralising power could be a useful mean to convey more ambitious agendas towards climate change that then could push back central governments. 

That is the case of the Scottish government, which, since the introduction of the Climate Change Act in 2009, has redefined its policy directions for addressing the subject compared to Westminster and the EU. Now, ten years later, they are pushing for an even more progressive policy shift by declaring a climate change emergency. 

Give cities a seat at the top of the table is a powerful claim in order to align actions and policy innovation by integrating cities to multilateral diplomacy. Notably, the emergence of C40 as a platform to push the global climate change emergency further into action is an illustrative example of this. Recently, at the C40 World Mayors Summit in Copenhagen, a group of mayors — including those from Paris, Copenhagen, Rio de Janeiro, Sydney and Tokyo, and led by Eric Garcetti from Los Angeles (and C40 elected chair) — have pledged for worldwide city-level support for a global Green New Deal.

This call is a direct response to intergovernmental action being blocked by a small group of powerful, science-skeptic governments, representing the interests of the fossil-fuel industry. The core principles of the Green New Deal are of the highest relevance to keep global warming below the 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement, by committing to emission cuts from the sectors most responsible for the current climate crisis: transportation; buildings; industry; and waste. 

Climate action, however, is just that: action. What remains to be seen is just how cities will forge a collective future ahead, and actually back up pledges with policy. The road ahead is difficult: Los Angeles, for example, is still one of the most car-dependent cities in the world; Rio de Janeiro, the home of the first Earth Summit, recently signed onto the C40 pledge, but the mayor is known for cutting spending on “non-essential” items, not growing them. 

So cities will not simply act on climate because of their inherent nature; it takes political will, popular push-and-pull, and pragmatic thinking. In our next Monthly Focus, we’ll showcase a few cities that are putting climate action front and center at the top of their agenda — where it belongs.

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Ignacio Pérez is a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. ignacio.perez@ouce.ox.ac.uk / @JIPerezK

John Surico is a journalist, researcher, and MSc candidate in the Bartlett School of Planning, at University College London. john.surico.19@ucl.ac.uk / @JohnSurico