ICLEI

In cooperation with the City of Bonn and the World Mayors Council on Climate Change ICLEI does not accept any kind of liability for the current accuracy, correctness, completeness or quality of the information made available in this paper. Abstract: Wastewater reuse is an important adaptation option for mitigating water stress in rapidly growing urban centres. But, wastewater reuse is easier said than done, particularly in developing countries. The task becomes even more challenging when one takes a basin-level perspective. We illustrate these challenges by studying the Vrishabhavathy River in Bangalore, India, which carries almost half of the city's wastewater. First, we find that the sewage treatment plant located on this river does not function efficiently and no positive impact of effluent discharge on river water quality was observed. Second, while the Sewerage Board has implemented conventional centralized sewage treatment and proposed its expansion and even larger scale p...

Cities are major drivers of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions--the sources of anthropocentric climate change, whilst also concentrating people, buildings, and infrastructures and therefore potential risk and impacts of the latter. As a consequence, planning for climate change in urban areas does not only provide the opportunity but should necessitate considering interactions between mitigation and adaptation actions. However, existing research found that only a minority of urban areas consider both mitigation and adaptation in their climate action plans, i.e. 147 Climate Change Action Plans (CCAPs) were identified among a representative sample of 885 European cities. We investigate these 147 CCAPs to understand the degree of integration of adaptation and mitigation and draw implications for the maximization of synergies and co-benefits of such a combined approach. Using the developed scoring framework to evaluate the level of integration of CCAPs, the research finds that most of the plans reveal a ‘moderate’ level of integration. Moderate integration characterizes a plan that identifies sources of emissions and vulnerabilities to climate change, as well as some qualitative consideration of the synergies, but one that lacks a systematic consideration of potential integration opportunities. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that one of the main gaps of the evaluation and implementation of more integrated climate change actions in cities is the insufficient quantitative evaluation of the costs and funding schemes for adaptation and mitigation action implementation.

Though many studies have looked into how TCNs formed their networks, how they share knowledge and expertise within their network and what their contribution has been on a local level, little is still known about their influence on international politics. And even less is known about the influence of TCNs on the climate change negotiations of the UNFCCC.

All life on this planet, including the quality of life for our children, is dependent on what the earth can provide. Clean air, water and food, safe areas to live. All of this is connected with the climate and climate change. It is expected that, when climate changes affects human lives more, citizens will seek for platforms to have influence on their political leaders.

TCNs, which are local and global at the same time (Betsill and Bulkeley 2004: 142), could provide citizens with such a platform.

So this mean that there is not only a gap in the literature on interest groups in international climate change negotiations, TCNs could potentially be a very influential interest group at the UNFCCC for their close connection to citizens and their voicing of these citizens’ concerns.

And these concerns could very well grow quickly, as in 2013 a working group on carbon emission policy and regulation held at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, concluded that all the efforts to design and implement treaties to control climate change have had “modest practical results in terms of curbing emissions” (Lucon et al. 2013: 938).

The focus of this thesis will therefore be on the influence of TCNs on the Climate Change Regime.

This leads to the following research question:
What is the influence of TCNs on the policy outcomes of the climate change negotiations compared to the influence of other interest groups?