Cities & local governments

[Article under review] - Equity-Based Emissions Allocations in Multi-Level Governance

The concepts of ‘fair-share’, or ‘effort-sharing’ are frequently invoked in climate policy, but a consistent methodology for applying them for cities and regional governments has been lacking. While it's well-established that many developed countries have exceeded their equitable carbon budgets based on historical emissions, the question remains: How can subnational governments define their own fair-share contributions to global climate goals?

In this paper (under review), we present the first multi-level equity-based framework that derives emissions allocations consistent across national and subnational levels of government globally. We derive emissions pathways for 3,596 local governments worldwide, based on the Paris Agreement equity principles of responsibility and capability, and use them to assess the ambition of the emissions targets of 160 subnational governments and 70 cities. Compared to national pledges, we find that local level targets are often more ambitious, but that achieving 1.5°C-allocations require important vertical and horizontal cooperation. To achieve these allocations, we suggest that local governments communicate their quantified “governance-dependent ambition gaps” as the regulatory and financial support needed from other levels of governments, and the possible international support implied by their population’s equity indicators.

Our analysis reveals that most of the world’s subnational governments have already exceeded their fair-share carbon budgets (shown in orange in our maps), regardless of the approach taken. Moreover, many local governments set ambitious climate targets compared to national pledges, yet achieving these targets will require stronger vertical (intergovernmental) and horizontal (international) cooperation.

Yann Robiou du Pont, Diego Manya, Kaihui Song et al. Equity-Based Emissions Allocations in Multi-Level Governance, 2025-preprint available here.