Michael Doust is Director of the CHAMP Secretariat and Director of Urban Efficiency & Climate at WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities.
As the UN Climate Change Conference (COP31) beckons, it’s easy to question whether climate conferences actually achieve anything, or to wonder why global emissions continue to rise despite decades of negotiations and scientific consensus.
These are fair questions. While some may criticize COPs and the Paris Agreement for falling short of making transformational change, today's climate ambitions would be far weaker without them. But ambition alone does not reduce emissions, strengthen resilience or improve lives. Implementation does.
Increasingly, the challenge for climate action is not a lack of solutions, technologies or even available finance, but the gap between national ambition and local delivery. Cities, states and regions are where many climate actions are implemented, where infrastructure decisions are made and where people experience both the impacts of climate change and the solutions that make places healthier and more resilient. Yet global climate policy remains focused on national governments, leaving cities, states and regions without a voice or the funding to accelerate climate action.
Closing this implementation gap may be one of the greatest opportunities to accelerate climate progress at scale — especially in cities, which are home to more than half the global population — delivering cleaner air, stronger economies, greater resilience and better lives for people and communities.
Local Representation Is Just the Start
Recent years have seen significant progress in bringing cities, states and regions into national climate planning processes. The share of national climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), featuring well-developed urban content has increased significantly from 49% in the previous revision cycle to 80% in the latest updates (NDCs 3.0). Driven in part by collaboration with regional and local governments, this shift suggests that nations increasingly recognize that the success of global climate goals hinges on local implementation.
National adaptation plans (NAPs), which like NDCs are part of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change process, are also showing stronger recognition of multilevel governance in their design. By August 2026, all of the 79 countries that had submitted these plans reference city, state or regional government authorities, according to analysis conducted by the NAP Global Network.
Representation alone is not enough. Many of the actions these plans depend on — transport systems, buildings, waste management, land-use planning, flood protection, green infrastructure and much of the energy transition — are implemented in cities, states and regions. Urban areas account for the majority of global energy-related emissions, and the impacts of climate change, from extreme heat to flooding, are felt most directly at the local level.
This points to a fundamental reality that global climate governance has often struggled to accommodate: National governments may set climate targets, but cities, states and regions frequently determine whether those targets are achieved.
Chile shows what this can look like in practice. With the long-term target of climate neutrality by 2050, its 2022 Climate Change Framework Law spread responsibility for implementation across 17 ministries and empowered local governments to develop tailored, localized climate policies. Regional climate change committees have been established across all 16 regions to develop and implement local climate policies, and city governments have been given formal authority for climate policy implementation. Similarly, Colombia developed its 2025 NDC with the active participation of cities and communities, committing to formally include local governments not only in climate planning processes but also in the implementation of mitigation and adaptation measures.
The Missing Implementation Link: Multilevel Governance
Climate change is often framed as a financing challenge or a technology challenge. Increasingly, however, it is also a governance challenge.
Let’s use COP31 as an example. Türkiye’s presidency has identified the clean energy transition, zero waste and methane reduction, and climate-resilient cities among its priority themes for the Action Agenda. While each addresses a different challenge, the success of each will depend on effective collaboration between national and local governments. Consider the clean energy transition. Most cities have little control over how electricity is generated or how national grids are funded, but they play a vital role in making the transition possible. Cities drive the electrification of buildings and transport, upgrade aging infrastructure and help manage growing energy demand. Planning across levels of government helps ensure that generation, distribution, transmission, storage and charging are coordinated, so that new demand from electric vehicles, heat pumps and data centers can be met by clean power rather than straining the grid. Without such coordination, national energy targets can quickly become disconnected from local delivery realities.
Between 1990 and 2020, Denmark increased the share of electricity generated from renewables from around 3% to more than 80%, demonstrating what effective multilevel climate governance can achieve. The national government established cross-party energy agreements that provided policy certainty across electoral cycles, while the Danish Energy Agency coordinated offshore wind development. Cities retained planning authority for onshore wind projects and national legislation required developers to offer at least a 20% ownership stake to local residents, helping communities share directly in the benefits of the transition. Together, these complementary roles aligned national ambition, local decision-making and public support, helping turn clean energy goals into delivery at scale.
The same dynamic is visible in transport. National governments set vehicle standards and charging infrastructure regulations and shape how finance reaches regional and local governments, while land use, zoning, public transport and urban mobility are decided locally. Neither level of government can cut transportation emissions alone.
India's electric bus transition demonstrates why: While cities were responsible for purchasing and operating buses, progress accelerated only when national government support helped overcome financial and procurement barriers. By combining subsidies, standardized contracts and pooled demand across multiple cities, India reduced costs and created the conditions for a national program aiming to deploy 50,000 electric buses by 2030.
Similarly, zero waste and methane reduction sit at the intersection of national policy and local delivery. Waste collection, recycling, composting and landfill management are municipal functions while the policies, standards and financing that allow municipalities to deliver these services at scale are often established at the national level.
Cameroon offers an example of a national commitment built for local delivery. Its NDC 3.0 sets a concrete target for every major city to have engineered landfills that capture at least 70% of the methane they produce by 2035.
These examples illustrate a broader reality: Many of the actions needed to achieve climate goals are delivered locally, while the policies, regulations and financing that enable them are established nationally. When these systems are disconnected, implementation slows, investments stall and climate targets remain out of reach. When they are aligned, ambition is far more likely to translate into results.
Finance: More Than a Funding Gap
There is undoubtedly a significant shortfall between the investments needed to achieve global climate goals and the resources currently flowing toward them — some estimates suggest that the urban climate infrastructure financing gap is currently between $4.1 trillion and $5 trillion annually.
But the challenge is not always the absence of capital. In many cases, finance is available. A significant share of the funding gap reflects a shortage of investment-ready projects. Too often, viable local projects struggle to navigate fragmented project preparation systems, secure guarantees or meet the requirements investors need before committing funds.
As a result, climate finance often gets stuck in the same bottleneck that affects climate implementation more broadly: the gap between national frameworks and local delivery.
Regional and local governments often struggle to qualify for loans or develop projects large enough to attract investors. However, national governments can help address these structural barriers by creating sovereign borrowing frameworks and other policies to stimulate the flow of investments. Without national alignment, regional and local climate commitments made through NDCs and NAPs often have no direct financing route.
This challenge is visible globally. A World Bank analysis found that, as of 2023, only 35 of the 100 largest cities in developing countries had issued a municipal bond. The issue was not the absence of climate priorities or investment needs, but the institutional and financial conditions required to attract financing.
According to that study, a municipality’s ability to attract financing depends on its capacity to actually deliver a funded project, sufficient revenue to cover debt service and financial records robust enough for a lender to judge repayment risk. National alignment can help close this gap through specific instruments such as blending public and private finance with credit enhancements, ring-fenced escrow accounts dedicated to debt service and pooled finance facilities that aggregate small projects to reach viable scale. By aligning national and local climate priorities, governments can give a city, state or region’s revenue streams a structure that a lender can assess and price.
Kenya's Financing Locally-Led Climate Action (FLLoCA) program illustrates this principle in practice. It channels climate finance directly to county governments rather than routing it through the national government. Counties receive performance-based grants to plan and implement local climate resilience projects, with funding tied to how well they meet climate governance benchmarks. In Bomet County, climate finance has been used to bring reliable water access to households that previously lacked formal infrastructure, while other counties have invested in solar-powered systems that strengthen both energy access and climate resilience. By combining national financing with county-led planning and community decision-making, FLLoCA demonstrates how climate finance can reach the people and places that need it most.
From Ambition to Implementation
If the first three decades of COPs were largely about building climate ambition, the next phase must be about delivering it with the urgency and scale the world needs.
The examples from Chile, Colombia, Denmark, India, Cameroon and Kenya illustrate that achieving national climate goals requires local solutions supported by national policies, financing frameworks and regulatory conditions. Whether the challenge is clean energy, transport, waste management, adaptation or climate finance, success increasingly depends on collaboration between levels of government.
Fortunately, momentum is building. Since its launch at COP28, the Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships (CHAMP) for Climate Action, whose secretariat is hosted by WRI, has grown into a coalition of 80 national governments and the European Union, all committed to strengthening collaboration with cities, states and regions in the planning, financing and implementation of climate strategies.
The opportunity now is to move from recognition to delivery. Cities, states and regions are increasingly represented in climate plans and international processes. The next step is ensuring they have the partnerships, institutional support and financing needed to help deliver on those plans.
The forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Climate Change and Cities, due in early 2027, is expected to provide the strongest evidence to date on how cities can help close both the ambition and implementation gaps. Its findings should also help inform the technical assessment of the Second Global Stocktake, part of the Paris Agreement's five-year process for assessing collective progress, which will help identify local priorities for future climate action.
For COPs to deliver on climate goals, they need to fully recognize how much their success depends on local action. This will determine whether climate ambition remains on paper or translates into the faster, more resilient and more inclusive transformation the world urgently needs.