Cities Often Don’t Choose the Best Emission-Cutting Strategies, Study Finds.
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Cities Often Don’t Choose the Best Emission-Cutting Strategies, Study Finds.
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Primary Author: Gaye Taylor
Cities and regions are tackling the challenge of climate mitigation, but competing priorities, limited resource, and other factors mean the most effective emissions reduction strategies are rarely chosen, finds a study published in Nature’s Communications Earth & Environment journal.
“Although the potential for cities and regions to contribute to global mitigation efforts is widely acknowledged, there is little evidence on the effectiveness of subnational mitigation strategies,” writes lead author Katherine Burley Farr in research published by a team of public policy experts from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
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The team reviewed 234 quantitative mitigation case studies (selected from a pool of 300,000), and synthesized their findings to help subnational governments at all levels “identify best practices and where investments may yield the greatest returns by way of emissions reductions.”
The results show that while subnational governments are clearly taking “widespread action to reduce emissions,” there is “misalignment” between the mitigation strategies that policy-makers focus on and the approaches that have the “highest expected impacts or lowest uncertainty.”
Overall “strategies related to land use and development, circular economy, and waste and water management are most effective and reliable for reducing emissions,” the researchers found.
In a finding that aligns with recommendations made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “cross-sectoral strategy categories (eg. land use and development, circular economy, and market-based mechanisms) had higher expected emissions reductions than single-sector categories (like electricity).”
Among single-sector strategies, electricity, as well as heating, did have “high mitigation potential compared to other categories.”
Jurisdictions looking for a slam-dunk in the certainty of outcomes may want to focus on building construction and retrofits and waste and water treatment, as these strategies “had the lowest relative uncertainty.”
But rather than largest expected impacts, or lowest uncertainty, Burley Farr and her colleagues suggested that “other policy characteristics and motivations are more important to policy-makers when considering mitigation options.”
Possible constraints may include a dearth of resources, complexity of implementation, or low public buy-in or political viability. Policy-makers in local and regional governments may also find themselves balancing their climate objectives with other goals that might “act as the primary motivation for the implementation of a mitigation strategy.”
“For example, policy-makers might choose to implement a waste management strategy to improve cost-effectiveness and sanitation or update their building efficiency standards to promote public health and safety,” say the researchers.
In other cases, cities “may be pursuing mitigation as a primary goal, but choosing mitigation strategies that provide specific co-benefits or synergies with other goals,” particularly in jurisdictions trying to “enable climate action in the face of political opposition.”
Significantly, strategies that have been “more frequently studied for both mitigation and adaptation benefits” are very popular—even in cases where the expected emissions reductions are low. The researchers cite active transportation as an example of a mitigation strategy that has “considerable potential for co-benefits with adaptation, air quality, and public health.”