Informing Climate Action Through Data-Driven Monitoring and Learning Empowering cities to overcome challenges in data collection, analysis, and insight generation, enabling continuous improvement and strategic learning in their climate transition efforts.

The Monitoring and Learning Pathway enables cities to effectively collect, analyse, and utilise data for optimising climate actions.

This Support Pathway focuses on:

• Robust Monitoring Frameworks: Effective monitoring frameworks, innovative data collection, and visualisation methods essential for tracking progress, results, and impacts. These frameworks enable strategic learning for climate transition while moving beyond GHG emissions to a holistic approach that includes co-benefits, making climate action relatable to all citizens.
• Enhancing Data Analysis Capabilities: Actively addressing resource limitations, developing effective tools, creating consistent monitoring frameworks, and increasing stakeholder engagement in decision-making are key. This approach supports identifying gaps, enabling real-time progress monitoring, and improving resource allocation efficiency to ensure a strategic and impactful approach to climate action.
• Capacity Enhancement: Providing essential tools and resources to strengthen the knowledge and capacity of city administration and stakeholders, facilitating effective monitoring and assessment of climate neutrality progress.

This Support Pathway helps to address challenges related to collecting, analysing and using data to inform and optimise climate actions.

Key challenges

• Limited data availability: Your city faces challenges in gathering and analysing data, due to fragmented data sources, lack of historical or baseline data, technological barriers, high cost of data collection and maintenance, or insufficient capacity.
• Lack of regional/national processes: Your city is not fully integrated into multi-level decision-making processes, hindering effective GHG inventory management and prevents the integration of these efforts into broader urban planning and policy development.
• Capacities: Your city faces difficulties in gathering and analysing essential climate-related data, making it difficult to measure progress and informed decisions.
• Limited support for emissions measurement: Your city lacks hands-on support in developing or using consolidated emission-measuring tools and frameworks, which are critical for monitoring climate action effectively.
• Skills and organisational structure gaps: Your city lacks the necessary expertise and human resource capacity and appropriate organisational structures that support comprehensive monitoring and reporting.
• Using existing reporting platforms: While platforms like MyCovenant and the CDP-ICLEI Track are available, your city struggles to fully use them and integrate their insights into local practices, reducing their effectiveness.
• Bridging learning and action: Your city faces challenges in applying knowledge in practical ways, such as refining policies and strategies, optimising resources and achieving cross-sectoral alignment.

Stages of the Climate Transition Map

This support pathway relates to the following stages of the Climate Transition Map:

• Understand the system
• Learn and reflect

To understand the system, at the early stages of your city's climate journey, your city will review the current monitoring system. This includes evaluating GHG emissions, setting up a baseline emissions inventory to set target reduction from, identifying gaps between current actions and targets, and estimating the budget needed to achieve climate objectives.

Before implementing a set of actions, your city must select indicators or determine signs of change to track progress toward climate goals. Monitoring the effectiveness of your portfolio requires tracking the direct benefits, particularly reductions in GHG emissions. It is equally important to track the indirect benefits, such as improvements in governance, public health, or social equity, to gain a comprehensive understanding of the broader effects of your interventions.

Linking planned actions to specific outcomes, including GHG reductions and co-benefits, helps clarify the impact logic behind each action. This approach focuses on data collection and monitoring efforts on tracking progress and refining interventions. Through an iterative process of learning and reflecting, data and insights from climate actions are used to observe progress, assess results, share knowledge, and reflect on next steps.

Understanding which solutions work, in what contexts, and for whom, enables your city to scale and transfer effective interventions across various emission domains and city-contexts. Importantly, this involves engaging local stakeholders of your local ecosystem to gather different views and experiences from existing climate efforts. By discussing what has worked and what hasn’t, your city can spot gaps, understand emissions as part of the wider system, and clarify the scale of change required.