Edinburgh is one of only 122 cities globally to be nominated to CDP’s 2022 A List, in honor of its leadership on environmental action and transparency amid a hard global economy.
Last year, CDP, an international organisation that manages the world’s biggest environmental disclosure system for corporations and localities, included Edinburgh on its list.
The retained A-List position recognises that Edinburgh has continued to:
- Publicly disclose a city-wide emissions inventory
- Set an emissions reduction target – for Edinburgh, this is a target of net zero emissions by 2030
- Published a climate action plan – Edinburgh’s 2030 Climate Strategy – which sets the strategic direction for reducing the city’s emissions and becoming resilient to future climate change
- Completed, and is in the process of updating a climate risk and vulnerability assessment
- A climate adaptation plan, showing how it plans to tackle the unavoidable impacts of climate change, which will be updated and extended to respond to the risk assessment
Edinburgh has recently published its Climate Strategy Progress Update report which shows it is making good progress against a number of its targets, while continuing to receive recognition as a city at the forefront of climate action. The city was ranked among the top three councils in the UK in 2022 by the Council Climate Plan Scorecard project for the quality of its Climate Strategy.
Since it declared a Climate Emergency in 2019, the Council has also made efforts to improve transparency on climate action and publishes annual progress reports on both the Council and city-wide emissions and progress toward net zero targets. Emissions data is also accessible on the Council website. New climate pages have been refreshed this year and are available at edinburgh.gov.uk/climate (see “Tracking progress to Net zero” page).
Designed to encourage and support cities to ramp up their climate action and ambition, CDP’s Cities A List is based on environmental data disclosed by cities to CDP-ICLEI Track. A clear momentum in city climate disclosure and action is building – for the first time, over 1,000 cities (1,002 in total) received a rating for their climate action from CDP in 2022, a rise on the 965 cities scored in 2021. In 2022, just over one in ten cities scored by CDP (12% of such cities) received an A.
A List cities are demonstrating their climate leadership through concerted and effective action, just as national governments have been asked to do at COP27. They are taking twice as many mitigation and adaptation measures as non-A List cities.
Edinburgh, alongside the other 121 cities on this year’s A List, are also celebrated for showing that urgent and impactful climate action – from ambitious emissions reduction targets to building resilience against climate change – is achievable at a global level, and in cities with different climate realities and priorities. However, this action needs to go further and faster.