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around large climate events such as COP 15 in 2009, the United Nations Climate Action Summit convened by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2014, and COP 21 in 2015 (figure 5.2). The slowdown in the number of new initiatives in 2016, 2017 and 2018 may reflect a shift in focus towards implementing the initiatives created in earlier years, as well as the importance of global political forums in catalyzing the formation of ICIs.
Regional participation
As figure 5.3 illustrates, many initiatives operate in several regions. Although the overall increase in recorded mitigation-focused ICIs since 2016 is relatively limited, regional participation in ICIs has increased in nearly every region of the world. The biggest increase is in Latin America and the Caribbean, where the number of ICIs has increased from 6 in 2016 to 25 in 2018. In Western Europe, Asia and the Pacific, regional participation has roughly doubled compared with 2016. It is worth noting that global ICIs may be active in regions with relatively low participation in regional ICIs, such as South-Eastern Asia and the Middle East. Furthermore, while ICI activities have been concentrated in high- and middle- income countries (Pattberg et al., 2012; Chan et al., 2015; Chan et al., 2018), the number of ICIs operating in lower-income countries grew dramatically between 2015 and 2017, rising by 56 percent in low-income countries, and 50 percent in lower-middle income countries (United Nations Climate Change Secretariat, 2017).5
Despite this
progress, a sizeable North-South gap remains, with only 22 percent of ICI participation and 23 percent of lead partners from non-OECD countries (ClimateSouth, 2018).
Sectors
Most ICIs (149 out of 220) cover multiple sectors, generally focusing on key sectors where the mitigation potential is significantly higher than the emission reductions implied by current policies and NDCs: the energy, industry, forestry, transport, agriculture, and building sectors (UNEP, 2017). An ICI’s sectoral emphasis often shifts according to the needs and capacities of the regions where it is implemented. Actions focused on resilience and agriculture, for example, are most commonly implemented in low-income and middle- income economies, while initiatives addressing the industrial sector are most prevalent in high-income or upper-middle income economies (Chan et al., 2018).
Setting goals and tracking progress
The percentage of ICIs that have set quantitative goals remains low, at around 22 percent. Quantitative goals – defined as a specific, measurable goal made
either by an initiative or an initiative’s members – range from focusing on emissions reduction (for example, reduce emissions by a specific amount by a specific year), to fund-raising (for example, raise, distribute or invest a specific amount of funds), to capacity-building (for example, reach a specific number of people or communities). Similar low levels of quantitative goals are reported in other studies (Pattberg et al., 2012; Hsu et al., 2015; Widerberg and Stripple, 2016; Graichen et al., 2017; Michaelowa and Michaelowa, 2017; Chan et al., 2018).
Graichen et al. (2017) found that 75 percent of the 174 ICIs they surveyed either did not include sufficient information about their targets, had unclear goals, or did not propose concrete actions. Focusing on emissions reduction targets, Hsu et al. (2015) found that just 8 out of 29 initiatives contained explicit emissions mitigation targets tied to a particular year. A study conducted by UNEP (2015) used a similar approach to narrow a list of 184 initiatives down to 15. However, among initiatives with clear emissions reductions targets, many have made more ambitious emission reduction commitments than national governments (Graichen et al., 2017).
Monitoring, reporting, and verification practices also remain weak across ICIs: just under 23 percent of ICIs on the Climate Initiatives Platform noted regular monitoring or reporting mechanisms. Other studies also report relatively low percentages of initiatives with established monitoring and reporting mechanisms, ranging from 31 percent (Graichen et al. 2017), to 43 percent (Pattberg et al., 2012) or 44 percent (Chan et al. 2018). Hsu et al. (2015a) found that more than half (18) of 29 ICIs announced at the United Nations Climate Action Summit convened by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki- moon in 2014 included provisions for monitoring progress, but that very few of these identified specific indicators to track performance. Bansard et al. (2016) likewise noted that the type and stringency of monitoring requirements varied widely among city-focused initiatives. Furthermore, many initiatives do not conduct or share cost estimates or feasibility studies, adding an additional barrier to efforts to assess the feasibility and identify potential barriers to initiatives (Roelfsema et al., 2015). Striving for “more and better” data collection (Widerberg and Stripple, 2016) from initiatives is required to facilitate efforts to assess ICIs’ progress and anticipate their contributions to climate action and sustainable development efforts (Roelfsema et al., 2015; Widerberg and Pattberg, 2015; Hsu et al., 2016). Some ICIs have developed approaches that demonstrate how this could be accomplished. The Bonn Challenge, for instance, maintains an interactive online dashboard tracking its signatories’ commitments, and their potential collective progress towards the initiative’s goal.6
5 Part of the increase may include adaptation-focused ICIs. 6 See
http://www.bonnchallenge.org/.
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