In the face of an escalating climate emergency, Daring Cities offers a supportive platform fostering collaboration between national and subnational governments to accelerate and stocktake the implementation of ambitious, inclusive and multilevel climate action.
Throughout 2024, we have spotlighted the Town Hall COPs initiative as an innovative mechanism linking climate emergency action to national and global efforts, empowering communities and subnational governments worldwide to make meaningful contributions to climate commitments on local, national, and global levels ahead of COP30 in 2025 and beyond.
A Town Hall COP is a dynamic community engagement platform bringing COP-style discussions to cities, towns, and regions. Basically, it is a COP brought to the local level, bringing administration, experts, local stakeholders and civil society together to assess and discuss climate change, climate mitigation, adaptation and loss & damage in a condensed format.
Town Hall COPs are designed to empower local governments and their communities to collectively address climate action, grounding ambitious local commitments in alignment with global climate goals. Building on thousands of climate emergency declarations and neutrality commitments made by councils worldwide, this initiative invites local actors to actively shape climate policies that directly impact their communities and, through these local dialogues, influence broader climate policies.
In 2023, over 20 local governments across six continents held “local stocktakes” to support the Global Stocktake of the Paris Agreement. Led by ICLEI as the focal point of the Local Governments and Municipal Authorities (LGMA) Constituency, this local stocktake pilot exercise underscored the value of multilevel collaboration, influencing COP28 in Dubai, where the UAE Consensus encouraged enhanced national commitments to multilevel climate action.
In parallel, 72 countries joined the Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships (CHAMP), pledging to integrate local and regional governments to collectively pursue efforts for the next round of submitting revised Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) due in 2025 at COP30.
ICLEI is now building on this momentum by advancing the local stocktake experience into Town Hall COPs, which will enable communities to refine and advance their climate goals while connecting directly to national and global action. In these gatherings, local leaders, public officials, and community members will discuss their climate emergency declarations, explore paths to climate neutrality, and contribute their insights to inform national climate plans. The outcomes of these Town Hall COPs will feed into NDC 3.0 at COP30 and the LGMA Constituency at the UNFCCC, thereby strengthening global multilevel governance.
Deriving from the Daring Cities 2024 Bonn Dialogues, Katja Dörner, Mayor of Bonn, Germany, and chair of the Climate Action Governance Portfolio for the ICLEI Global Executive Committee called on mayors to mobilize their national city associations to urge their governments support for climate ambition through multilevel action and multilevel NDCs, aligned with the CHAMP initiative.
Last June, the Association of German Cities (Deutschen Städtetag, DST) adopted a resolution marking the first national position of local governments supporting CHAMP. Spearheaded by Mayor Dörner, Vice President of the DST, the resolution also encourages cities to convene their Town Hall COPs as an innovative approach to connect national and global processes.
Similarly, the United States Conference of Mayors issued a resolution supporting CHAMP and encouraging cities to back Town Hall COPs as the next iteration of the Paris Agreement local stocktake process and a key mechanism for receiving input to secure a robust multilevel U.S. NDC by 2025.
Charting the roadmap to Belém, Daring Cities is committed to promote the Town Hall COPs to catalyze multilevel collaboration and amplify local climate perspectives within broader climate processes toward a just, equitable, and resilient climate future.
How can cities and regions help their countries level up their climate goals? In this session, we focused on implementing COP28’s Coalition For High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships (CHAMP) initiative for climate action. We explored ways to enhance collaboration across government levels and sectors and identify pathways for integrating local actions into national and international climate agendas ahead of the next round of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) due in 2025 at COP30 in Belém, brazil.
Under the Town Hall COPs initiative, cities and regions can contribute with their unique and critical perspectives by hosting their own local events – effectively “mini-cops” – to take stock of their climate efforts.
How do you “power up” your work on multilevel climate action? As the final session of the Daring Cities Virtual Forum, this webinar launched our official Daring Cities 2024 Key Messages. These impactful insights distilled from our discussions are designed to support efforts by you and your colleagues to drive the message of collaborative action in tackling the climate emergency forward.
Looking ahead, we explored key engagement opportunities during Urban October and chart the path toward UNFCCC COP29 in Baku. We dove into the Local Governments and Municipal Authorities’ (LGMA) Constituency position paper, revealing how it connects to CHAMP and COP, and also dug into details of how Town Hall COPs can complement the annual cycle of climate action at the local, national and global level.