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EMISSIONS GAP REPORT 2018 – BRIDGING THE GAP: THE ROLE OF NON-STATE AND SUBNATIONAL ACTORS
5.5 Opportunities for harnessing the potential of NSA climate action to enhance ambition and bridge the emissions gap
The previous sections illustrate the magnitude, diversity and potential contributions of NSAs to climate change action, forming the basis for a number of recommendations on how to further strengthen NSAs’ action to realize their emission reduction potential. These recommendations are briefly summarized below.
First, more actors must engage in climate action. Scaling up individual and collaborative climate action to more geographic areas, sectors and types of actors could significantly contribute to realizing the large mitigation potential of NSAs. NSAs from previously under- represented regions of the world are starting to take action. Many regions, particularly in the Global South, are still under-represented in terms of participants, lead organizations, and the location of secretariats. Encouraging NSAs in developing countries to engage in initiatives would facilitate climate action in growing economies with potentially large and low-cost mitigation potentials. Scaling up also entails ensuring a broad range of sectors, including currently under- represented ones such as oil and gas.
Second, national governments can play a vital role by stimulating this growing movement, and can for example support non-state actors by providing collaboration platforms, capacity building and technical and financial resources. Furthermore, national political institutions are crucial to transnational climate action (Andonova et al., 2017). Governments can also support the implementation of individual commitments. In order to support urban climate action, for example, governments could develop policies and approaches for enhancing the capacity of local governments, including providing financial investments and enabling private investments to lower GHGs (Broekhoff et al., 2018).
Third, transparency is critical to assessing NSA actions and tracking their implementation. This report clearly shows that although progress is being made, transparency and related monitoring, reporting and verification standards require improvement at all levels: individual, cooperative initiative, and global. Commitments are often vague in terms of goals, language and enforcement mechanisms, while different baselines, timelines and assessment frameworks are used to report on progress. Implementing monitoring, reporting and verification mechanisms for cooperative initiatives is particularly important, in order to document tangible results, NSA climate actions could gain credibility among the broader public and decision makers. These mechanisms would also facilitate learning, allowing the organization to assess performance on an ongoing basis and to experiment with new approaches.
Data collection and reporting efforts are starting to enable more sophisticated analysis on the potential for NSA climate action to contribute additional GHG reductions beyond national governments commitments. However, data gaps (particularly in high-emitting sectors and developing countries) limit these analysis, meaning they do not necessarily capture the diversity of the NSA climate action taking place. Particularly where sustainable economic development is a pressing concern, NSA climate action takes on different forms besides participation in transnational climate action networks, focusing also on adaptation, capacity- building and resilience functions that are more difficult to quantify and aggregate on a global scale.
Finally, NSAs play different important roles and functions and their contribution to global climate change governance goes beyond what can be measured in terms of direct emission reductions. These aspects – including orchestration, catalytic effects, and experimentation – should therefore be kept in mind.
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