Powering commercial aviation with fuel made from cooking oil, wood chips, or garbage? These climate-friendly alternatives are closer to market than you might think.  

Dedicated funding is a critical ingredient for urban clean energy action, but securing it is one of the most persistent challenges that local governments face today. Some leading communities are marching ahead on their own.

Leading local governments do not travel alone on the road of climate action-- they partner with other jurisdictions and networks to get deeper and faster results. These collaborations have turned low-carbon city efforts into a movement.

Urban leaders are looking beyond their typical toolbox of policies, programs, and partnerships, and experimenting with new approaches to achieve carbon reduction through cleaner energy supply, building energy efficiency, and low-carbon transportation.

In the early days of climate action, urban plans to reduce carbon frequently suffered from the laundry list syndrome: cataloguing potential strategies without any evidence of how they would meet long-term goals. Since then, cities and counties have become more sophisticated about cutting carbon, and are developing clean energy transition plans to do it.

Leading urban governments have set aggressive goals such as carbon neutrality and 80% reduction by 2050, and others have committed to sourcing 100% of their energy with renewables. These are not empty pledges, but achievable goals that local officials are already implementing.

In December 2015, international leaders will gather in Paris for what are arguably the most important global climate talks ever. Countries are updating their carbon reduction pledges, which currently fall far short of what is necessary to hold global warming at two degrees Celsius. This represents an ambition gap among national negotiators that the bold climate leadership of city officials around the world can help close.