Congratulations to Cascais, Cleveland, Edmonton, Goiania, Johannesburg, Las Vegas, Paris, Sydney, Venice, and Yokohama! Out of over 200 cities that took part in CDP’s cities program in 2014, these ten score the best for the quality and completeness of their environmental risk reporting.  To highlight their achievement, CDP has created in-depth InFocus reports for each city.

In addition to congratulating these cities, it is also important to examine what made them top-performing cities in 2014.  What common climate actions are these cities taking?  What type of data do they report?

Using CDP’s , we can take a deeper look into their activities.  In general, these cities report complete and accurate data across all themes, including city-wide greenhouse gas emissions, risk and opportunities, and climate strategy.  Let’s look in-depth at greenhouse gas emissions and efforts to reduce them.

Measuring city-wide emissions

All of our top cities measure and report the total city-wide emissions for their municipalities.  Most of these inventories are recent — Johannesburg completed its most recent inventory in 2013, while every other city in the top ten completed their inventories after 2010, with the exception of Venice, Paris, and Sydney.

Cities also report why their emissions increased or decreased since last year.  Here, the challenges of managing emissions at the city-level become apparent.  The City of Edmonton, which noted a slight increase from its last inventory, explained that a drop in residential natural gas consumption was likely related to weather changes, while the reason for an increase in its industrial emissions was unclear.  Changes in the electricity mix of the grid after the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake drove Yokohama’s slight increase in emissions.   Even for these leading cities, managing emissions at the city-level is a difficult job.

Emissions reduction actions

This data set shows the incredible scope of activity that these ten cities are taking to cut emissions.  Las Vegas reports 22 individual emissions reduction actions, including a project to deploy smart energy meters to residential buildings.  Paris, which reports 27 emissions reductions activities, has also calculated the total project emissions reduction over lifetime associated with each project – as do the likes of Cascais and Cleveland.   Cleveland reports the largest single emissions reduction, from a suite of energy efficiency retrofit measures for residential and commercial buildings, which will save the city over 2 million metric tons of CO2e over the lifetime of these projects.

Find out more about how each top-performing city is tackling climate change in their InFocus reports:

You can explore more data from these top-performing cities on climate risks and opportunities, target setting, and more on our open .

Kyra Appleby is the head of CDP’s cities program.

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2015 is a big year for climate policy. People the world over – politicians, campaigners, businesses and individuals – are gearing up for a year of important negotiations, which will set the future agenda for mitigating climate change and adapting to its impacts. In fact, many people have been working specifically to inform and influence these discussions for several decades already.

Naturally, much of the focus is on the COP-21 conference in Paris at the end of 2015, which (it is hoped) will conclude a new global climate deal. But Paris is not the only show in town.

Sendai

Preparing for the risks posed by extreme weather events is a major element of adaptation to climate change. In March, Sendai, Japan will host the third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction. This will finalise a new agreement to succeed the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) that was agreed in 2005, setting out a new, concerted global approach to managing disaster risk.

Nations have reported significant improvement over the last decade against some of Hyogo’s priorities – around monitoring, early warning, and preparedness – but there has been slower progress around addressing the underlying drivers of risk, including patterns of development.

A post-Hyogo framework will ideally provide a stronger mechanism to embed understanding of risk into development. It is critical to ensure that the significant investment flowing into low-income countries in the next two decades enhances resilience. The new framework is likely to include a new emphasis on the knowledge and capabilities of local actors (including cities) in mitigating disaster risk, recognising that the localised nature of impacts can be at odds with nationalised approaches to preparedness.

91Ӱ�� has been supporting the preparatory work for the new framework in a number of ways. We have supported the Disaster Reduction Private Sector Partnerships (DRR-PSP) working groups 1 and 2, and have developed the UNISDR City Resilience Scorecard in partnership with IBM. As part of our partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative, we are also helping to develop resilience strategies for cities around the world, including in San Francisco, Christchurch and Quito.

New York

The next big event for the year is in September, when nations will meet at the Special Summit on Sustainable Development in New York to agree a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the period 2015-2030. This will succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which have been in place (with mixed success) for the last 15 years.

Although the MDGs included a goal focused on sustainability that referenced the need to reduce carbon emissions, the current draft of the SDGs go further to include ‘urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts’ as a goal in itself – with sub-goals focused on building resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards.

Properly aligning the SDGs on climate with the post-Hyogo framework, and the forthcoming global agreement on carbon abatement is recognised as essential to the success of all these efforts.

Paris

Finally the show will roll on to Paris in December. The 21^st UN Climate Change Summit (COP-21) will set out to agree a legally binding accord for post-2020 emissions reductions across all nations, as well as voluntary pledges for immediate action before 2020.

The process concluding in Paris is different from previous climate negotiations for some important reasons. Rather than drawing a distinction between ‘developed’ and ‘transition’ economies, this will be a universal agreement applying to all 196 countries. And it combines the traditional ‘top-down’ emission reduction targets with ‘bottom-up’ frameworks for action known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs). In doing so it is intended to allow countries to take action to cut emissions in the certainty that all other countries will be doing the same.

Cities in the lead

Interestingly, while the spotlight at Paris will be on the national delegates, cities and municipalities have increasingly been driving the agenda with their proactive steps to cut emissions and promote low-carbon development.

The Compact of Mayors, announced at the September 2014 UN Climate Summit in New York, brings together over 200 cities (home to 436 million people) pledging voluntary emissions reductions of 13 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. This is backed up by ambitious action plans and transparent measurement and reporting through the new Global Protocol for Community Scale Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories (GPC), itself launched at COP-20 in Lima in December 2014.

Mayors were conspicuous in Lima, representing their cities alongside ministers at high-level dialogues, and releasing the Lima Communique, which called for an ambitious post-2015 climate programme driven by action from cities and sub-national governments.

Lima also saw the launch of NAZCA (Non-State Actors Zone for Climate Action), a data platform showcasing mitigation actions by cities, businesses and sub-national actors. This builds on the Carbon Climate Registry run by ICLEI, UCLG and C40 cities, which now reports on the mitigation actions of more than 500 members.

91Ӱ�� is also working with cities around the world to support their efforts to reduce emissions, which must remain a priority, alongside efforts to adapt. In partnership with the World Bank, we are in the process of developing the CURB (City Action for Urban Sustainability) tool, which can help cities identify and prioritise carbon abatement opportunities. This will be officially launched in April 2015.

Happy New Year!

Taking this all together it is easy to see how 2015 could be a watershed year in the global response to climate change. Indeed, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon recently stated that 2015 would be the “year of Sustainability” and the “most important” year since the founding of the UN itself 70 years ago.

But there is plenty more hard work needed to get there – to keep up the momentum and shape the best possible outcome. We are looking forward to it.

To learn more about climate change action, contact Ben Smith (ben.smith@aecom.com) for Europe, Middle East, Africa; Claire Bonham-Carter (claire.bonham-carter@aecom.com) for Americas; and Michael Nolan (michael.nolan@aecom.com) for Asia, Pacific.

Roland Chanin-Morris (roland.chanin-morris@aecom.com) is a senior consultant in 91Ӱ��’s London-based Economic Development team. Working closely with the design and planning groups, Roland provides analysis of the large-scale and long-term economic drivers of cities and urban regions.

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