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The Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) has focused on providing the corporate sector “with a clearly defined pathway to future-proof growth by specifying how much and how quickly they need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions”.²¹ The targeting process involves a widely accepted methodology from the World Resources Institute, CDP, UN Global Compact, and World Wildlife Fund to calculate reduction pathways for different sectors. That methodology apportions the Paris Agreement’s emissions-reduction goals to each entity according to their capacity to reduce. The methodology helps organizations calculate the emissions reductions to target in accordance with any of three aligned approaches: a sector-based division of the global carbon budget; an absolute approach based on emissions reductions required; and an approach that uses an entity’s relative economic contribution to determine its emissions reduction target. As of December 2019, over 740 companies had committed to science-based targets.

The SBTi has not yet created similar pathways and guidance for cities but (1) points to the C-FACT methodology as a useful corollary of the method²² and (2) has inspired a science-based approach.

Importantly for our summary here, it provides a principle for cities when targeting “Net-Zero”: looking to the best-available science to help inform the appropriate share of emissions reductions for the city and defining how quickly the reduction should occur to be in line with global climate stabilization targets.

The contraction and convergence approach developed by the Global Commons Institute back in the 1990s, but championed more recently by C40 in its Climate Action Plan guide,²³ helps cities measure and “converge” on an emissions per capita that is becoming equal to its relevant peers and also “contracting” enough for global net-zero emissions to be achieved by 2050.

Keeping global temperature rise under 1.5–2°C requires leaders to focus their strategies on both the total amount of global emissions reductions and detailed accountability for each city’s appropriate share of their relevant national total. To say a city’s net-zero target or pathway is science-based communicates that the city has considered its appropriate obligations under the Paris Agreement and has set is emissions-reduction target accordingly. Of the many strong examples of “science-based” leadership to net-zero emissions, the Mayor of London’s “Zero carbon London: A 1.5^oC compatible plan”²⁴ explicitly links the plan to the global temperature goal in the Paris Agreement.