Beyond global targets: Turkish cities reveal 5 key lessons for delivering local climate action ahead of COP31

Cities identified several conditions needed to make this possible. Projects need a strong framework that supports planning, design and financial structuring to become financeable, supported by a phased pathway in which grants fund early-stage work, loans follow as projects mature, and private investment and capital markets come into play later.  

Practical, standardised decision-support tools can help cities match projects with the right financing models, from grants and loans to ESCO models, blended finance, public-private partnerships and green financial instruments. Just as importantly, municipal teams need the skills and capacity to develop projects and navigate these increasingly complex financing options. 

The broader lesson is that grants work best when they seed investment rather than sustain it. Building the pipeline between an idea and an investable project is therefore as important as increasing the amount of finance available.

Governance models proved strongest when they featured institutional coordination, shared ownership and clearly defined responsibilities across departments.  

Several practical solutions included appointing climate focal points across departments, sometimes spanning hundreds of staff, and developing integrated data systems coordinated through strategic planning units.

Internal review processes can also ensure that climate implications are weighed in at the design stage before they proceed, instead of being discovered later. Procurement can incorporate criteria such as emissions thresholds or sustainable materials into tender requirements and scoring, the same way social clauses already shape bids, which pulls every supplier towards better practice. Shared repositories of coordination tools packaged for shareability can also help these approaches travel between municipalities, allowing them to be adapted to different levels of capacity.  

Treating both in the same way risks widening the implementation gap that climate policy is trying to close. 

Scale matters and applying identical rules to both simply produces failure at the smaller end. Governance frameworks, support mechanisms and regulatory expectations therefore must reflect these differences – and be differentiated by scale, with shared or regional service models for the smallest municipalities. This paves the way for a coherent national approach. 

Municipalities also cannot decarbonise assets and systems they do not control. Even within their own boundaries, many municipalities lack control over the forests, carbon sinks, and large green spaces they cannot manage. Cities can only act right up to the edge of their authority, which compels the need for clearer division of responsibilities between national and local government, and between metropolitan and district municipalities. 

4. Building a pathway for a just transition

The just transition agenda offers a valuable framework to ground local climate plans in social equity, but it's the least developed area for cities. Tackling energy poverty, for example, requires social protection to be combined with investments in energy efficiency, access to clean energy, and employment opportunities linked to the green transition. 

What emerged was a clear call for stronger local needs assessments, systematic use of spatial and socio-economic analyses, and gender disaggregated indicators to underpin climate plans. Cities were also clear that aggregated and estimated data will not cover everyone. The people most exposed to the effects of climate change are often the ones least visible in official records, missing from the datasets a strategy is built on. Elected neighbourhood principals (Muhtar) are a vital link for reaching those residents, gathering information, and turning a climate plan from a document held at city hall into something that connects with people it's meant to serve.  

For example, transport authorities, energy distribution companies and other organisations often hold datasets with essential insights for local climate planning. But access to it is often limited – with transport data being one of the hardest to obtain for many municipalities. The effort to obtain it often costs more time than the analysis itself, leaving less to translate into evidence to support their strategies.  

Other gaps have direct implications for a just transition. Data on energy poverty, disability, migration and income is often unavailable at neighbourhood scale, partly due to data-protection rules towards central social-services records. That makes it harder to identify the most vulnerable communities and design adaptation measures that respond to local realities.

Cities repeatedly emphasised that these challenges are better addressed nationally than municipality by municipality. A coordinated open-data system, with shared protocols and common reporting standards that would improve data availability, clarity on data ownership, and interoperability across municipalities with different sizes. Ideally, those standards would line up with international reporting frameworks, so a city gathers its data once and submits it multiple times, instead of rebuilding the same figures for each new platform and framework. 

"These are precisely the kinds of implementation questions that become visible when cities are able to compare experiences. Municipalities will inevitably find different solutions, but because they work under the same national framework, one city's experience in one area can quietly answer another's question elsewhere, and taken together, those experiences can reveal common conditions that make climate action easier to deliver," – said Celik Bulgurlu. 

COP31 gives those lessons additional urgency, but their relevance extends well beyond one conference. If national and European climate ambitions are to translate into measurable change, cities need more than targets to work towards. They need the institutional conditions to deliver them.