The value of inter-cities performance metrics on tackling climate change
Climate change is real. As shown in the Rio’s Olympics opening ceremony, global temperatures are consistently rising, as well as the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The main consequence of this pattern is that extreme weather events will become increasingly more likely to occur and their outcomes may become increasingly more severe in terms of both economic costs and human lives.
As most of sustainability-related issues, climate change is clearly a wicked problem: strong conflicts of interests, many levels of overlapping jurisdictions, different levels of understanding (or even recognizing) the problem, enormous asymmetries among the various stakeholders and, above all, no consensual single way to solve it. In this context of challenging complexity it is extremely important that city leaders share information and exchange their experience on fighting climate change, but it is even more important to have a standardized metric to assess a city’s performance on that fight. It is true that each city will have different specific challenges and therefore a different specific approach, that is part of climate change being a wicked problem, but a standardized framework to assess performance and to share cases of success and failure certainly constitutes an important tool to address this global problem with local actions. Moreover, the full disclosure of future plans and targets consists of an important mechanism of transparency and accountability, that will show in the near future which policies and programs were actually successful in achieving their goals.
The former Carbon Disclosure Project, now simply CDP, provides a very good example of such metrics and has been fairly successful in engaging increasingly more cities to participate in their program. They are a London-based NGO that started about 15 years ago with the goal of standardizing companies’ disclosure of climate-related data and strategy. After that, they have expanded their scope to include other initiatives like the CDP Water, Supply Chain, Forests and Cities.
Similar to their questionnaire tailored for companies, the CDP Cities program provides a very detailed and comprehensive questionnaire where the participant cities can disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, their actions and targets towards reducing those emissions, their perception of climate-related risks and opportunities and their actions to address each of them. The cities’ responses are public and anyone can access. So it is a good place for citizens (or investors or any other stakeholders) to check the commitments and targets of a certain city, but it is also a great platform for different cities to learn from others’ experiences and to identify benchmark practices.
Other inter-cities collaboration initiatives, such as the C40 and the 100 Resilient Cities, are also important forums for cities to share knowledge, experiences and best practices on addressing climate-related problems, but what is special about CDP is that it provides a standardized framework to collect quantitative and qualitative data for measuring and comparing cities’ performances. With that, all sorts of analyses can be done in order to assess which are the key features of successful programs and policies.
Effectively addressing the challenges posed by climate change requires city leaders to take an adaptive approach, in which the conflicting interests and points of view are always taken into account and the strategy is constantly reviewed considering lessons learned and new factors that arise on the way. Inter-cities collaboration has a lot to contribute on that regard, but a data-centered, transparent and standardized metric to success, such as the one provided by the CDP Cities program is key to make this collaboration more meaningful and effective.
