Lesson
Part of: City Climate Action Planning
Climate Action Plans Can Address Two Areas
BOOKMARK
City climate action plans can address:
- Mitigating climate change by assessing and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and/or
- Adapting to climate change by assessing the vulnerabilities of city locations and determining how to adapt them to flooding, drought, temperature fluctuations, or species changes caused by climate change.
This guide focuses on mitigation but many city plans include both.
Most mitigation climate plans contain:
- a city-wide emissions mitigation goal,
- actions to reach the goal, and
- indicators to track progress toward the goal.
Actions can be anything from enacting a more stringent building code to promoting public transport.
Some examples of city climate change plans:
Baltimore’s plan focuses on inclusive processes and programs to improve sustainability awareness, education, and training.
Copenhagen’s plan has an aggressive target to reach carbon neutrality by 2025.
Johannesburg’s climate action plan includes both mitigation and adaptation goals.
