Making the Case for Climate Action in Cities: The Role of Co-benefits and Monitoring Systems in Urban Governance for Net Zero

Recent efforts to mainstream climate action in urban governance have focused on a co-benefits approach. Cities advocate low carbon place-based investments on the basis that they can deliver wider social and economic benefits, such as access to green spaces, cheaper energy, job creation, and cleaner air or water. In parallel, recently devised climate action planning tools share these features: integrating climate-related actions (master planning); outlining the co-benefits of actions across key high emitting sectors such as energy and transport (i.e., impact pathways); seeking to generate new forms of governance, actor mobilization, and finance; and, creating a local enabling environment by convening key stakeholders and citizens. Despite these developments, the monitoring and reporting systems and data platforms used by cities (e.g., CDP-ICLEI Track, Kausal, ClimateView, and MyCovenant) are primarily focused on measuring emissions reductions. Tracking co-benefits and reporting on them remain marginal activities. This, combined with a lack of a unified approach to co-benefits, methodological challenges, and city-level capacities and capabilities, has resulted in a diversity of co-benefit approaches, with cities picking which ones they can/want to measure. In this paper, we compare the designs of the C40 and NetZeroCities impact frameworks and critically reflect on their complexity, limitations, and implications for local policymaking in the context of the urban climate governance system. We conclude by highlighting the need for a more integrated view of co-benefits functions , ensuring a more “collective intelligence”-based approach marked by participatory feedback loops and decision-making processes rather than a narrow focus on the most readily quantifiable factors.