Empowering Local Climate Action - Governance, Data, and Contextual Insights from Cities in Asia and Africa.

Climate change is a pressing global challenge that profoundly impacts communities, economies, and ecosystems. The urgency to address this issue has never been greater, particularly at the local level. The way we manage will play a significant role in shaping humanity's future in the 21st century and beyond. Effective local-level governance structures that engage diverse voices and perspectives are crucial for achieving national and international climate adaptation and mitigation goals and building local resilience. The localization of climate action is deeply embedded in the particularities of different communities, considering their local context, which includes unique terrain vulnerabilities, resources, and socio-economic realities. As a result, localizing global and national commitments can be complex, requiring extensive planning, coordination and resources. In this context, efficient multilevel governance and data informed decision making play a key role in enabling localized climate actions.
The demand for massive coordination and contextualization is only possible with the involvement of community-led 'frugal' and mundane data innovations. Community-led open data is crucial in decentralized decision-making and bridging local communities with city officials. These localized actions in cities foster trust among government actors, civil society, and the public, rooted in the equitable recognition of leveraging data-driven decision-making and community participation.
Experiences from Asian and African cities emphasize that communities should be the creators, architects, and arbiters of local climate actions in cities. These cities have piloted new governance models, such as community-led, contextual and data-driven tools for the public good. With their transformative potential and ability to drive innovation at scale, the localization of solutions offers powerful tools for identifying on-ground risks, optimizing resources, and designing adaptation measures. Empowered local action ecosystems produce numerous opportunities to strengthen local capacities, evidence-based policymaking, and effective governance, enhance responsiveness to community needs, improve reporting, and build co-ownership of climate policies, strategies, plans, and projects.
Empowering local climate actions has strengthened community-led open data and effective local governance capabilities, developing the required agility and improved resilience for future climate crisis management. To institutionalize this transformation, Asian and African cities are now on the path to establish the right institutional coordination mechanisms and service delivery. The new inclusive institutional mechanisms that have evolved in these cities in the past can serve as models for helping other local governments worldwide realize the benefits of empowering the localizing climate actions.