Q5. Successful example plans?
Question: What are some successful examples of cities implementing effective climate action plans?
Query result: Box 8.3: Coordination of Fragmented Policymaking for Low-carbon Urban Development: Example from Shanghai, China (Page 913)
Chapter 8 Urban Systems and Other Settlements. In IPCC, 2022: Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the 6th Assessment Report of the IPCC
URL: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/
Cite: This chapter should be cited as : Lwasa, S., K.C. Seto, X. Bai, H. Blanco, K.R. Gurney, Ş. Kılkış, O. Lucon, J. Murakami, J. Pan, A. Sharifi, Y. Yamagata, 2022: Urban systems and other settlements. In IPCC, 2022: Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [P.R. Shukla, J. Skea, R. Slade, A. Al Khourdajie, R. van Diemen, D. McCollum, M. Pathak, S. Some, P. Vyas, R. Fradera, M. Belkacemi, A. Hasija, G. Lisboa, S. Luz, J. Malley, (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, USA.
Content:
Chapter 08 : Urban Systems and Other Settlements
Box 8.3: Coordination of Fragmented Policymaking for Low-carbon Urban Development: Example from Shanghai, China
As a growing megacity in the Global South, Shanghai represents the challenge of becoming low carbon despite its economic growth and population size (Chen et al. 2017). Shanghai was designated as one of the pilot low-carbon cities by the central government. The city utilised a coordination mechanism for joining fragmented policymaking across the city’s economy, energy, and environment. The coordination mechanism was supported by a direct fund that enabled implementation of cross-sector policies beyond a singlesector focus across multiple institutions while increasing capacity for enabling a low-carbon transition for urban sustainability (Peng and Bai 2020).
Implementation and governance process
In Shanghai, coordination between the central and local governments had an instrumental role for encouraging low-carbon policy experimentation. Using a nested governance framework, the central government provided target setting and performance evaluation while the local government initiated pilot projects for low-carbon development. The policy practices in Shanghai surpassed the topdown targets and annual reporting of GHG emissions, including carbon labelling standards at the local level, pilot programme for transitioning sub-urban areas, and the engagement of public utilities (Peng and Bai 2018).
Towards low-carbon urban development
New policy measures in Shanghai were built upon a series of related policies from earlier, ranging from general energy saving measures to air pollution reduction. This provided a continuum of policy learning for implementing low-carbon policy measures. An earlier policy was a green electricity scheme based on the Jade Electricity Program while the need for greater public awareness was one aspect requiring further attention in policy design (Baeumler et al. 2012), supporting policy-learning for policies later on. The key point here is that low-carbon policies were built on and learned from earlier policies with similar goals.
Outcomes and impacts of the policy mix
Trends during 1998 and 2015 indicate that energy intensity decreased from about 130 tonnes per million RMB to about 45 tonnes per million RMB and carbon intensity decreased from about 0.35 Mt per billion RMB to 0.10 Mt per billion RMB (Peng and Bai 2018). These impacts on energy and carbon intensities represent progress, while challenges remain. Among the challenges are the need for investment in low-carbon technology and increases in urban carbon sinks (Yang and Li 2018) while cross-sector interaction and complexity are increasing.