States, regional governments more committed to decarbonise: Report

State and regional governments were responding to the threat of climate change faster than their national counterparts, a report jointly by The Climate Group, CDP and PwC UK said on Friday.

Leading states and regions have committed to decarbonise at a rate of 6.2 per cent a year.

This is just 0.2 per cent away from the decarbonisation rate needed to align with a 2 degrees Celsius pathway -- far more ambitious than national governments.

Sub-national action is on the increase, with the number of states and regions disclosing their climate data growing from 44 governments in 2015 to 120 states and regions across 32 countries.

The findings come ahead of the Conference of the Parties (COP24) in Katowice in Poland next week, where states, regions, cities and businesses are calling for national governments to step up their ambition following the example set by the commitments made at the Global Climate Action Summit (GCAS) in September.

Of the 120 state and regional governments, 40 per cent were already reporting actions across both mitigation and adaptation to climate change -- the combination of which is vital, according to the latest IPCC science, to achieve the accelerated transition to a 1.5 degrees world.

Since the signing of the Paris Climate Change Agreement in 2015, the number of adaptation actions reported by states and regions has increased by 74 per cent, said the report.

A total of 265 targets for emissions reductions, renewable energy and energy efficiency have been disclosed. Eighty per cent of these targets were from governments in the Under2 Coalition, the largest global coalition of states and regions committed to acting now on climate change.

Tim Ash-Vie, Director of the Under2 Coalition Secretariat at The Climate Group, said: "This report shows that leading states and regions are already taking tangible steps to get to a world under two degrees Celsius warming.

"In light of the recent IPCC Special Report, we need to listen to the warnings from the scientific community and even these climate leaders will need to take stock of the progress that they have already made, consider where they might increase their ambition further still, and adjust their sights to the 1.5 degrees challenge."

This year, 37 governments from Argentina, Brazil, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay and Mexico disclosed, and Latin America became the second largest group of disclosing governments after Europe.

This demonstrates the increasing level of climate leadership from developing and emerging economy regions across the globe, said the report.

--IANS

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