Cities like Bogota in Colombia and Gujarat in India are leading with the way, with projects designed to build a low-carbon and climate resilient future, according to a new analysis.
The report by consultancy Arup and supported by the Earthshot Prize, highlights how urban leaders are already delivering innovations in their own localities, which are cutting emissions and improving the lives of residents.
And it argues cities which integrate various policy elements appear able to move more quickly than national governments in translating climate ambition into tangible outcomes, particularly on air quality and emissions reduction.
The study contains 11 climate innovations across mobility, air quality, waste, restoration, and finance from various cities.
It also comes at a critical time, with cities predicted to house 68% of the global population by 2050.
In addition, cities also account for more than 70% of global carbon dioxide emissions and consume around three-quarters of global energy.
The report highlights the work being done in Bogotá, Columbia, including the Urban Zone for Better Air strategy.
The strategy is a place-based initiative to improve air quality in the parts of the city where higher pollution exposure overlaps with greater social vulnerability.
It works alongside another program, FONCARGA, which has designed to modernize the city’s cargo transportation fleet by replacing old, highly polluting vehicles with cleaner, more efficient technologies.
And it also comes on top of a public transport electrification program, which has reduced the PM2.5 emissions of the city’s public bus fleet.
Bogotá’s environment secretary, Adriana Soto said air quality policy works better when cities treat it as a public health issue, in an interview.
Soto added cities should not only rely on city-wide policies, or only on the electrification of transport, but instead take a more territorial approach and look to help the people facing the greatest social vulnerability.
She said data is the most useful when it helps authorities to act with precision and individual measures are rarely enough on their own.
“Cleaner air does not come from just one intervention. It comes from a combination. In the case of Bogotá, it has come from better roads, cleaner transport, and urban greening,” she told me.
“The move toward zero and low-emission public transport has been one of the most important shifts in Bogotá’s environmental story,” said Soto.
“When you invest consistently in cleaner public transport, you do not just modernize mobility, you actually change the city’s emission profile.”
Another of the projects highlighted in the report is the world’s first emissions trading scheme for particulate matter (PM2.5), which has been piloted in the industrial city of Surat in India.
The scheme was first launched in 2019 through partnerships with the University of Chicago, Yale University, and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab and has reduced pollution by 20-30%.
The scheme aims to curb air pollution by setting an overall cap on PM emissions, allowing plants to buy and sell permits and stay within a fixed pollution limit, in a similar manner to emission trading schemes also in place in the European Union.
The executive director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, Kaushik Deb said it creates a monetary incentive to ensure air quality targets are achieved, in an interview.
Deb told me the scheme has been so successful that it is now being expanded to include textile plants in another city in Gujarat, Ahmedabad.
He also added that they are designing state-wide SO2 emissions trading markets in Maharashtra and Rajasthan, with the proposed Maharashtra market expected to cover sectors including power, cement, petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, and iron and steel, among others.
He said they are also looking at whether the trading scheme can be developed for water pollution.
“I want to kind of get to a point where we have this as a plug-and-play model, which can be adapted to any pollutant and is available for all of these big jurisdictions in the Global South,” he said.
Deb added researchers have calculated 49 of the 50 most polluted cities in the world are in the Global South, and about 20 of them are in South Asia.
“In Delhi, we have something called the air quality life index, which shows if you’re living here, you are losing about 8.2 years of your life just because of the poor air quality.