Multilevel Governance for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation

Climate change is the defining issue of our time, and we are at a critical moment. It intensifies heatwaves, droughts, flooding, wildfires and famines, while threatening to submerge low-lying countries and cities and drive more species to extinction. It also threatens food supply and food security. The Climate Change 2023 Synthesis Report of the IPCC1 highlights the unequal contributions to global greenhouse gas emissions, driven by unsustainable energy and land use, as well as consumption patterns. Human-caused climate change is already impacting weather extremes globally, leading to widespread adverse impacts, especially affecting vulnerable communities. Tackling climate change demands a paradigm shift in mitigation and adaptation measures, policy coherence, institutional arrangements, and coordination across national, regional, and local levels. Multilevel governance, including commonly used strategies to operationalize the principle of subsidiarity, is foundational to the global effort to combat climate change, recognizing that effective action requires collaboration and coordination across various levels of government, as well as with non-state actors. The principle of equity needs to be applied to the design of existing multilevel governance arrangements for addressing climate change, particularly when costs and benefits are often highly concentrated. It emphasizes the importance of considering equity in decision-making processes and the allocation of resources to address climate change effectively and fairly.