This report aims to capture the scope and impact of climate action from cities, regions, and companies, utilizing climate mitigation commitments made by the respective actors through some of the world’s largest voluntary platforms for pledging and reporting on climate commitments. The report first explores the scope of cities, regions, and companies making climate commitments and describes what these commitments entail. Then, it estimates the mitigation impact that cities, regions, and companies could produce in 2030, both globally and within several key high-emitting countries, through commitments made by these actors on their own, and through international cooperative initiatives’ (ICIs) commitments.
We build on a number of previous studies that have laid important groundwork in establishing methods and analyses for aggregating the climate mitigation impact of city, state and region, and business commitments (see Hsu et al., in review, which evaluates 24 of these studies). The methods we apply here have benefited from these efforts and the input of dozens of practitioners and experts convened through the Collaboration on Methodology, Data and Analysis (CAMDA) working group. Two methodological appendixes detailing the methods used to quantify 1) individual city, state and region, and business commitments to climate mitigation and 2) international cooperative initiatives’ (ICIs) impacts are included alongside this report.
