Enhancing transboundary climate governance

Event details

The COP29 UN Climate Change Conference in 2024 highlighted the transboundary and cascading risks under climate change, as well as emphasised urgent need for international cooperation to strengthen climate action and achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in sustainable resource use and sustainable consumption and production patterns. For example, as indicated in SDG progress report (2024), climate change worsens the water scarcity problem, in the meantime, transboundary river and lake basins are shared by 153 countries, supporting 40% of the world’s population, however, less than a fifth of these countries have operational arrangements of their shared transboundary waters. In this context, transboundary Climate Governance (TCG) has become indispensable in addressing climate risks with collective effort.

The emergence of transnational and global city networks aligns with the imperative for TCG through coordinated efforts. Climate city networks such as C40 and ICLE establish cities as both locally rooted and global actors, facilitating governance actions for climate mitigation and adaptation (Wei and Wei, 2024). City networks in Europe contribute to 27% of the greenhouse gases (GHG) emission reduction targets set by the European Union.

Nonetheless, equivalent attention to transboundary climate change adaptation, its co-benefits, and synergies with mitigation efforts remain underexplored, as do the emerging trade-offs. Discrepancies also exist regarding exposure to transboundary climate risks, depending on the level of dependence and integration into the global network, raising concerns about climate inequity issues.

Additionally, TCG in China also involves land spatial optimisation in both urban and rural areas through landscape refiguration and cropland redistrubution in the context of climate change. We thus propse enhancing TCG through both global city network and land-spatial optimization.