SPM Exclusive Blog: A Global Pulse: PlaNYC's Influence on the C40 Cities Framework
Amid strained international institutions, an escalating climate crisis, and stalled national governments, questions arise about where the power lies to enact sustainable change. Yet, just over 20 years ago, 18 mayors banded together to identify a solution: establishing a city-governance-driven global network dedicated to empowering climate action, one that continues to expand its influence today. The objective was to coalesce the leaders not just under a common goal, to mitigate emissions, but also to disseminate both successful and failed policy frameworks to foster a network united by a shared vision and collective knowledge. Now, 96 cities representing 23% of the global economy have joined the network (C40 Cities), driven by ambitious investment, Paris-aligned climate action plans, summits across the globe, and evolving learning models.
Five years after C40’s inception, Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York became chair and championed a model that vitalized his own city’s climate action blueprint: the data-driven approach. The focus was on tracking, documenting, and disclosing emissions to ensure accountability, create standardized measures of progress, and cultivate a shared identity among participating cities. This leading principle has served as the foundation for the network’s premier objective: halving fossil fuel use by 2030, as monitored through tracking the percentage of C40 cities that have peaked their emissions.
Under the Bloomberg administration, New York City created a comprehensive citywide inventory of greenhouse gas emissions, spanning government operations and community sources. (NYC.gov) The New York City Panel on Climate Change—an organization tasked with producing climate projections based on modeling to inform future policy—was the first of its kind to be integrated into a city. Throughout Bloomberg's 2007 PlaNYC: A Greener, Greater, New York, data collection and reporting were woven into several strategic objectives, laying the groundwork for monumental climate legislation: Local Law 22, mandating the Mayor’s Office’s annual publication of the greenhouse gas inventory, and Local Law 97 targeting building emissions reduction using the baseline year 2005, a benchmark strategy attributed to Bloomberg.
“In addition to these targeted initiatives, we must also embrace a broader perspective, tracking the emerging data on climate change and its potential impacts on our city.” (PlaNYC).
Bloomberg’s data-driven model, popularized through his leadership with C40 and New York City’s success with PlaNYC, normalized practices of measurement and disclosure, leading to increased transparency, informed program development, and strengthened accountability.
As part of the Columbia Climate School’s PlaNYC at 20: A Retrospective on 20 Years of Sustainability Planning New York City Conference, co-authors Anyi Wang and Dong Guo are preparing an extended piece titled “From Local Action to Global Impact: How Cities are Driving Urban Sustainability Transition.” This paper examines how cities drive urban sustainability through voluntary commitments and localized actions, with particular attention to the role of transnational city networks such as C40. Wang and Guo present a number of case studies demonstrating data-driven approaches across represented cities: green infrastructure informed by stormwater retention data, waste diversion metrics, sector-specific emissions inventories, building energy benchmarking, and more.
Questions:
In your piece, you describe how Bloomberg's data-driven approach spread across the network because cities recognized its value in strengthening accountability and creating shared standards. Likewise, in 2008, Toronto Mayor David Miller established C40 as a peer-learning network to exchange best practices on buildings, transportation, energy, and adaptation. Looking at C40 today, has the organization largely evolved past identifying best practices, or does this still remain central? What has become its primary focus (deepening implementation, expanding its membership)?
Yes, sharing best practices has always been an essential function for city networks, including C40, in addition to networking, collaboration, and legitimacy generation. What is unique about C40 is this best practice sharing has been enhanced by the accountability framework which illustrates what works and what does not do through measured outcomes. It allows mayors who are keen on implementing similar interventions to gauge the feasibility of replication and localization. More importantly, it provides key metrics for benchmarking, target setting, and evaluation, should another city pilot a similar program.
Furthermore, the accountability framework allows cities to learn from each other based on more objective measures of outcome, regardless of historical, cultural or geographic proximity. As David Gordon points out in his 2020 book “Cities on the World Stage - The Politics of Global Urban Climate Governance”:
[B]arriers to cooperation [among cities on climate change are] rooted in the tendency for intercity interactions and communication to be driven by historical ties, geographic or cultural proximity, and common language, rather than being driven by functional similarity (powers, capacity, characteristics, challenges) or evidence-based efficacy.
In terms of C40’s primary focus, deepening implementation is clearly one of them. In addition to the more system-wide guidance for cities to develop coherent but localized and data driven sustainability agenda through programs such as the Climate Action Planning Framework (later the Cities Climate Transition Framework), C40 has launched more than a dozen of “Accelerators” and numerous initiatives and programs on specific climate challenges. Accelerators, such as the C40 Renewable Energy Accelerator, are campaigns that bring signatory cities together to a specific area of urban sustainability (e.g., renewable energy), setting defined and time-bound targets for measurable progress. The C40 initiatives or programs are more numerous and diverse, each focusing on a smaller group of cities. For example, the “Breathe Cities” initiative aims to help cities worldwide reduce air pollution, cut carbon emissions, and improve public health.
Although the network has been growing since its foundation, what is equally important than expanding membership is building capacity for cities to implement data-driven agenda. Implementation of the PlaNYC-style accountability framework may require technical, operational, and cultural change from local governments. There might be training for staff in data collection and tracking and building partnerships with external consultancy if necessary. More importantly, even the metrics and data are available, integrating them into policymaking and decision making could require a change in organizational and administrative culture. At the time of this writing, we are still planning on investigating how C40 assists cities with less capacity in implementing the accountability framework through stakeholder interviews.
Why is it important to reflect on and assess PlaNYC's legacy in New York and beyond? More specifically, how do you see the PlaNYC20 project, and the scholarship it generates, contributing to the continued evolution of urban climate governance?
PlaNYC can be considered as a landmark of how cities address climate change and urban sustainability in a strategic, systemic, and scientific way. As David Gordon (2020) puts: “The release of PlaNYC in April 2007 immediately conferred upon the city a reputation for seriousness, ambition, and excellence. PlaNYC was widely seen to be a ‘big deal’ with respect to how cities tackle the challenge of being more sustainable.”
The PlaNYC20 project comes at a prime time – 20 years after the initial landmark PlaNYC and more than a decade after the signing of the Paris Agreement that prompted cities to be a key driver of global sustainability – to look retrospectively how PlaNYC’s data-driven approach influenced cities around the world in both local strategies and transnational collaborations to combat climate change.