If cities are to truly take the lead in combatting climate change, we need an ambitious city with purpose-driven city leaders to accelerate a just transition to a sustainable future. We need them to help define the city’s goals and for individual ambition to inform and feed into collective ambition for a city we all want to live in, and where we think our children and grandchildren will in turn want to stay or return to.
But alongside ambition we need clarity. “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there,” said Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland (Figure 1.2). There are cities all over the world with a number of sustainability goals, but to truly take the lead on climate change we should reach and then surpass “Net-Zero” (capital letters to be explained) into carbon negative, eco-restorative territory – as soon as each city is able, and well before 2050.
Figure 1.2 If you don’t know where you are going any road will take you there. (Source: EllerslieArt/Adobe Stock.)
To achieve this necessary climate goal while managing all the other priorities of the complex modern city, we need leaders that are truly connected: to themselves; to the team around them; to their communities and stakeholders; and to an awareness and appreciation of the entire system they are trying to manage and change.
What could this look like? A city would have a bold, clear, co-created goal that the city leadership, community leaders, and citizens readily understand and support. A city’s climate action plan would target a fully scoped, science-based, Paris-Agreement-compliant, cumulative “Net-Zero” well before 2050; and it would do so in a way that also makes the city greener, more equitable, more resilient, smarter, friendlier, healthier, and all the other qualities to be examined in later chapters.
And just as Maya Angelou told us as individuals to “Be yourself, only better”, cities will have achieved this in a variety of complex, adaptive, ingenious ways – peculiar to their own unique assets and their own unique, ambitious citizens.
Cities: The Need for Ambition and Clarity
Cities have been hives of ambition since they were first created. Birthed by the ambitious, they have attracted like minds in search of their fortune, of significance, of life’s meaning, and much more. Today, we need these hives of ambition to assume leadership of the just transition to a sustainable world.
Thomas Berry, in The Great Work, describes these decisive decades in the context of a long multicentury arc as one when we have to work out how to become a benign force on the planet – with ourselves as fellow humans and with all creation. This is, in essence, the “Great Work” that lies before us. And as faith in national governments and global institutions falters, it is in the city level of democracy and leadership that we locate a stable point of leadership to embrace this level of responsibility.
Reaching the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement will require ambitious actions from all sectors and levels of our society, but especially in our cities. More than 55% of people already live in urban areas, and this is forecast to rise to 68% by mid-century.1 Urban areas account for more than 60–70% of the world’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, consuming 66–78% of the world’s energy, while occupying less than 2% of the land.2 Even as we decouple economic growth from emissions – already achieved by over twenty countries before – the sheer scale of the amount of people living in cities means that climate leadership by cities requires ambition and talent at city-scale as much as ever before in history.
But ambition on its own will not be enough. A mayor will always fall short when simply citing “a net-zero city” as a strategic goal. It may sound good, but without clarity in describing that destination it may even come to be seen as just a PR stunt that sounds good but lacks substance (Figure 1.3). At the other extreme, a crystal-clear set of cautious environmental objectives is simply not going to be bold enough in this time of climate emergency. So, how do we retain the ambition but increase the clarity on what cities can and should be aiming for to lead on climate?
Figure 1.3 The need for both ambition and clarity will drive success. (Source: Boyd, P. and Pickett, C., 2020. Climate Ambition: A Case for Net-Zero Clarity. Yale Center for Business and the Environment. https://cbey.yale.edu/research/defining-net-zero.)
As I’ve argued with co-author Casey R. Pickett in a recent paper3 – from which this paper draws – we need a consistent definition of “Net-Zero” that cities (and organizations, companies, and countries) can use and measure progress against. If we are to maximize the probability of a just transition to a sustainable society, all actors have to explain what they mean by “net-zero” in addition to their intended deadlines and paths. We suggest four measurable criteria for any undertaking of “net-zero” to be worthy of capitalizing to “Net-Zero”.
“Net-Zero” and Beyond for Cities
In a refreshed and robust definition, a strategy for “Net-Zero” GHG emissions earns its capital letters if it is: Fully Scoped, Science-Based, Paris-Agreement-Compliant, and Cumulative. Each descriptive term imparts a dimension of clarity. “Net-Zero” can be a powerful and useful goal at the city level if the city embraces a concept of “Net-Zero” that is:
1 Fully Scoped: articulating the city’s defined scope of responsibility. This should include all GHG emissions from scope 1 (GHG emissions from sources located within the city boundary); scope 2 (GHG emissions occurring as a consequence of the use of grid-supplied electricity, heat, steam, and/or cooling within the city boundary); and scope 3 (all other GHG emissions that occur outside the city boundary as a result of activities taking place within the city boundary).4
2 Science-Based: incorporating a destination-based5 target for “Net-Zero” that demonstrates the city is assuming bold, appropriate responsibility for emissions reductions consistent with the Paris Agreement and at least proportional to its contribution to climate change.6
3 Paris-Agreement-Compliant: specifying if and to what extent carbon credits and external investments in carbon removal factor into the strategy. Any offsetting investments should be linked to the global carbon budget as defined in the Paris Agreement.
4 Cumulative: acknowledging the city’s historical emissions of GHGs, not just their current level.
And Beyond …
We will unpack each of the terms above and what it means for cities, but we should first explain the “and Beyond” of the title, as its meaning is designed to be taken in at least two ways. For cities to set climate action goals solely through a lens of GHG emissions would be too narrow and not recognize the complex set of interconnected goals and stakeholders. All climate goals in a municipal environment are often phrased within the Brundtland Commission definition of sustainability,7 encompassing sustainability for social, economic, and environmental benefit. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have built on this important work over decades, and we have since heard most sustainability targets referring to not only the destination but also the nature of the transition, and the ambition to make the transition