Stepping Up Climate Action at Home: How Local Governments, the Private Sector, and Civil Society Can Help Countries Deliver NDCs and Enhance Ambition

The role of nonstate and subnational actors in accelerating implementation of the Paris Agreement is permeating domestic and international climate policy processes in new ways. From We Are Still In and America’s Pledge in the United States to the Alliance of Pioneer Peaking Cities in China, from Japan’s Climate Action Initiative to ActionLAC in Latin America, domestic and regional climate action has emerged as a powerful tool. The outcomes from the Global Climate Action Summit will be taken to the Talanoa Dialogue at COP24 by groups such as C40 Cities, the Global Covenant of Mayors, We Mean Business, Under2Coalition, and others. The UN Secretary General’s 2019 climate summit will need to bring a new configuration of these groups together, linking global and domestic in a push for countries to step up climate ambition in 2020.

This discussion will examine the following:

• How to align these efforts to ensure international climate policy processes, including the Talanoa Dialogue, at COP24 can further leverage the groundswell of climate actions to support a global “step up”;
• How the emergence of domestic and regional climate action coalitions can advance policies and bring new representation of key geographies to the global stage;
• And what steps are needed after COP24 to bring a new configuration of nonstate and subnational actors together, with global and domestic representation, at the UN Secretary General’s 2019 climate summit.

This Galvanizing the Groundswell of Climate Actions meeting is hosted by the Climate Action Network–International, Oxford University, the Stanley Center, the World Resources Institute, and WWF.