City–company collaboration towards aligned science-based target setting

Date

2024-12-01

Author

Kılkış, Şiir
Bjørn, Anders
Bai, Xuemei
Liu, Jianguo
Whiteman, Gail
Crona, Beatrice
Seaby Andersen, Lauren
Hasan, Syezlin
Vijay, Varsha
Sabag, Oscar

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Cities and companies have great potential to reduce pressures on Earth system boundaries (ESBs). Science-based target setting has emerged as a powerful tool to help achieve the potential, but its uptake is still limited. Moreover, cities and companies usually develop their targets separately even though many colocate. Focusing on the top-emitting 200 cities and 500 companies, here we analyse the current state and potential of adopting science-based targets for climate. Of these key actors, 110 cities with existing net-zero targets and 22 companies with existing science-based targets can eliminate up to 3.41 GtCO2eq of annual emissions. We argue that this reduction potential can increase by as much as 67% (to 5.70 GtCO2eq) when these cities and companies that already have targets bring their colocated counterparts on board to abreast ambitions. Using freshwater as another example, we discuss entry points for addressing interrelated ESBs through city-company collaboration. Our findings elucidate previously untapped potentials to accelerate transformations for operating within ESBs.

URI

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01473-w
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/112775

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Article