Cities are key actors in the fight against climate change. Progress made in data collection on city involvement in global governance is crucial to their success.
The impact of cities fighting climate change is becoming more visible and ever better documented as local leaders progressively step up their commitment to tackling one of the planet's deepest crises. Crucial to this story is progress over the past decade made in data collection on city involvement in global governance.Â
Environmentally-focused city networks have grown to become crucial collective action mechanisms by which member cities share knowledge and other resources, and access multilateral funding and legitimacy.Â
But do these networks help facilitate the all-important outcome of decarbonization, or the actual reductions of urban GHG emissions? Advances in data collection have allowed this working paper's authors, Senior Nonresident Fellow Michele Acuto and Benjamin Leffel, to demonstrate in a recent study that on a global scale, more concurrent city membership in environmental city networks indeed are associated with greater urban GHG emission reductions.Â
