City–company collaboration towards aligned science-based target setting

Kilkiş Ş., Bjørn A., Bai X., Liu J., Whiteman G., Crona B., ...Daha Fazla

NATURE SUSTAINABILITY, cilt.7, sa.12, ss.1-18, 2024 (SCI-Expanded)

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 7 Sayı: 12
  • Basım Tarihi: 2024
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1038/s41893-024-01473-w
  • Dergi Adı: NATURE SUSTAINABILITY
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus, CAB Abstracts, Compendex, Food Science & Technology Abstracts
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.1-18
  • Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

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.