What? There are Cities that Don’t Have Plans for Climate Change?!
A new, first-ever study of climate planning by 885 European cities reveals several patterns:
- More than a third of the cities--local authorities--have done NO climate planning for either GHG reduction or adaptation--and nearly 9 out of 10 cities have no adaptation plan.
- In nations without any national government mandate to conduct climate planning, it's mostly the largest, and presumably more affluent, cities that have done climate planning.
- In nations that have no local climate planning mandates, cities that participate in city-based networks, such as the European Union Covenant of Mayors, are more likely to have produced a climate plan.
- Few cities have integrated their GHG-reduction and climate adaptation plans.
It would be no surprise if these patterns are present in the US, where there is no national mandate and few state-government mandates for climate planning. Of the nearly 2,000 municipalities with more than 25,000 people, it's likely from scattered data that only 10-20 percent, a few hundred of them, have taken steps to develop adaptation plans.
In addition to flagging the frustrating slowness of urban adoption of climate planning--it's nearly 30 years since the first small set of cities started to tackle their GHG emissions--the European study and its likely US counterpart underscore the challenge of aligning policies across levels of government. The willingness of some cities to drive ambitious climate-change planning has attracted worldwide attention, but an important basis for making sustained, high-impact progress on both mitigation and adaptation is the alignment of policies at the national, state, sub-national region, and local levels. Cities can't do everything by themselves. Nations can't just order cities to plan and act.
This new study suggests a huge Policy Alignment Gap in Europe, and it's no doubt worse in the US.
