Controlling the "Big Four"

What is the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance?

It’s a member-driven group of cities in the vanguard of the carbon neutrality movement. Their goals are more ambitious than those set by international treaties. They want to be carbon neutral by, 2025, 2030, or 2035 – much sooner than national and international targets.

Is there an 80/20 principle at work here? In other words, are a couple of big things cities can do to become carbon neutral?

Sure. They’re what I call the Big Four. Power generation, transportation, building operations, and waste management tend to be the biggest sources of carbon emissions, so most cities’ climate action plans focus on those areas.

Power generation varies quite a bit, depending on how much control a city exercises over its local utility. Cities often don’t directly control power generation in their region.

Working to electrify transportation is a big issue. Encouraging people to buy electric vehicles, use public transport, use shared services, and start biking or walking. Making sure the city buys renewable energy for the transportation system and the grid.

Building operations are important: heating, cooling, lighting, cooking. Migrating those activities to cleaner energy sources is a big strategy for many cities.

As for waste management, cities need to sort organic matter from the waste stream and manage it so as to avoid methane emissions. Also key: recycling and creating more circular value streams out of the goods and services being consumed in cities.

As far as Scope 1 and Scope 2 (direct emissions), those are the big ones.

Can cities can impose top-down mandates on people, or do they have to get popular buy-in? 

Citizen engagement is central to the equation. Cities have to lead from a policy perspective. But even when they do, they have to make sure there's buy-in.

Many things require strong civic engagement. For example, a city can provide electric transportation, but if people perceive private cars to be more comfortable, or convenient, you can’t overcome that simply by increasing awareness of electric vehicles.

We’ve seen instances where ambitious climate policy has overstepped its popular mandate and failed because there was not enough buy-in. Maybe those policies didn't reflect the needs of communities, and people weren't actively engaged in developing them. There’s a lot of approaches that don't go very far. As cities begin striving to reach harder-to-reach emissions targets, a great deal of community agency will be required.

Public policy really has to work for people. If it doesn't, cities won’t reach their goals.

Which cities are leading the way in carbon neutrality?

Copenhagen wants to become the world’s first carbon-neutral city by 2025; Stockholm aims to be climate-positive, absorbing more carbon that it emits, by 2030.

But in terms of who’s leading, it really depends on the metrics you use. Some cities are leading in transitioning their grids to geothermal or hydropower. Others are leading in transportation, or reducing emissions from buildings. 

What do you see when you look ahead five years or so?

I see three main trends.

Scope 3 emissions. Cities are moving to cut emissions that take place outside of city boundaries, so-called upstream/downstream or Scope 3 emissions. This gets them into new areas of policy and action, such as embodied carbon. That’s carbon embedded in the goods and services we consume. There’s embodied carbon in building materials; in the vehicles we drive, in the food we eat. Such consumption-based emissions are the new frontier for many cities.

Climate justice. Second, as climate action has intensified, there’s been a real sense of urgency in putting equity and justice at the center of climate action. We need to make sure that climate policy really addresses inequity – that it’s not just another force exacerbating inequities.

Combining adaptation and mitigation strategies. Cities already face significant climate change in the form of extreme heat or rainfall, drought, or deteriorating air quality from wildfires, and they have been adapting to these challenges. The trend we're seeing is that cities are trying to make their climate mitigation and adaptation policies converge. Cities can’t just focus on reducing emissions in the future; they also have to adapt to climate change right now. Finding ways for both sets of policies to complement each other, to create new opportunities – as happens in resilience hubs – is key. People are most concerned about the challenges/risks created by climate change – if you can address those than you can also have the conversation about emissions, about ways to reduce one’s impact.