Beyond COP30: How cities are leading the climate agenda
Three months after COP30, the most consequential climate leadership isn’t coming from national capitals, it’s coming from city halls, where implementation, accountability and public trust converge
When the gavels fell in Belém at the close of COP30, the headlines focused – as they often do – on what the negotiations were expected to deliver and did not deliver. And it is true: reaching a comprehensive international agreement on climate remains stubbornly difficult. But to read the story of COP30 solely through the lens of what national delegations could or could not agree upon is to miss something far more significant. Something is shifting. And it is the implementation happening at the local level.
Local and regional governments are no longer waiting for a perfect global consensus to act. Across ICLEI’s network – spanning more than 2,500 cities, towns and regions worldwide – elected leaders are setting ambitious targets, making important infrastructure investments, and delivering measurable reductions in emissions and greater climate resilience for their communities. This is not symbolic; this is concrete climate action delivered with and for citizens.
If climate policy does not work locally, it does not work at all
Global targets, while they seem far removed from our daily lives, are actually implemented through local zoning laws, procurement decisions, building codes, transport systems, and public investment. Without local delivery capacity, international ambition remains declarative rather than transformative. At COP30, this collective voice was impossible to ignore. Nearly 3,000 subnational leaders gathered at the COP30 Local Leaders Forum in Rio, co-hosted by the COP30 Presidency and Bloomberg Philanthropies. Together, they delivered a joint statement to heads of state centred on three demands: genuine partnership in implementation, equitable access to climate finance, and a COP process reoriented around accountability and real-world delivery.
ICLEI, as the focal point organisation of the Local Governments and Municipal Authorities (LGMA) Constituency to the UNFCCC, carried this message directly into the negotiating halls in Belém, representing more than 50 networks of cities and regions. ICLEI’s President, Mayor Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh of Malmö, stood alongside heads of state to ensure that the local government perspective was heard where it matters most.
This is why the LGMA Constituency was calling formally, in its COP30 position, for a mandated dialogue on multilevel governance and urbanisation, delivered through in-session workshops linked to UNFCCC sessions.
From ambition to action: What local leadership looks like
On the ground, cities and regions are already leading the transition. They understand what is needed and how to deliver it. Yet too often they are neither meaningfully consulted nor adequately empowered and financed to act.
Within ICLEI’s network, local and regional governments are guided by five integrated development pathways – equitable, zero-emission, nature-based, circular and resilient – that embed climate goals into urban planning, infrastructure investment, service delivery, and social policy. These are not pilot projects, but systematic, long-term transformations of how cities and regions function. And crucially, they are approaches that national governments can learn from, co-invest in, and scale.
One concrete example from COP30 illustrates what this looks like in practice. ICLEI and partners scaled up ProUrbano, a programme that links disaster risk insurance with adaptation finance across Latin America and the Caribbean.
By combining an Urban Infrastructure Insurance Facility with an Urban Adaptation Financing Facility, the programme is now endowed with €58 million, helping cities understand, transfer and reduce climate risks while converting risk data into financeable adaptation projects. This is the kind of locally driven, institutionally grounded innovation that can be replicated on a larger scale.
From negotiation rooms to everyday governance
One of the most important shifts in the post-COP30 period is a growing recognition that climate governance cannot be reduced to two weeks of negotiations each year. Delivery happens in between, in city councils, regional budgets, community consultations, and infrastructure decisions made every day.
The Town Hall COP initiative embodies this principle. By convening inclusive, locally led climate summits that connect directly to people’s lives, from jobs and health to housing and public services, Town Hall COPs ensure that climate governance is not an abstract, distant process but a participatory one grounded in lived experience. The insights generated in these forums are shared with the UNFCCC process, aiming to strengthen overall ambition through bottom-up engagement.
Europe’s opportunity: Integrating local leadership into COP31
The path from Belém to COP31 in Türkiye is a critical opportunity. It should advance three priorities: First, formal recognition in international climate frameworks that implementation is inherently local, and that subnational governments must be empowered and resourced accordingly. Second, direct and simplified access to climate finance for local and regional governments, removing the intermediary barriers that currently prevent cities from translating global commitments into funded projects.
Current financing structures are often channelled exclusively through national governments, creating delays, misalignment and missed opportunities for locally bankable projects. Third, structured, mandated dialogue between the UNFCCC and local government networks, so that the evidence base from cities, including the forthcoming IPCC Special Report on cities, shapes international climate policy rather than simply validating it after the fact.
Science is moving in this direction. The incoming IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Cities is expected to make clear just how central subnational action is to meet global climate goals. The question is no longer whether cities are ready to lead. It is whether international governance frameworks are ready to recognise and empower them.