##Introduction It is no secret that cities are the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, but we know less about what role cities have played in promoting positive developments to combat climate change. Recognizing this, I aim to answer the question is: What role do city governments have in promoting climate finance?

A later draft will detail how the OECD calculates climate spending and further descriptions of limitations in current accounting.

##Methodology My primary data source is the OECD Subnational Government Climate Finance Database, which tracks climate finance by level of government since 2001. It includes information disaggregated by expenditures, long-term investments, and climate-related revenues. I also include country level economic and population statistics from the World Bank and International Monetay Fund. Moving forward, I will try to benchmark these expenditures against emissions data featured in the Global City Emissions Database, which unfortunately does not track local emissions over time, but gives the most comprehensive look I can find at number of cities and their emissions in the 2010-2015 period.

##Analysis In order to delve into the data, I wanted to see how much of climate finance is comprised of local level expenditures and investment compared to the same measures at the state and national levels. As evidenced by the graphs below, the vast majority of climate finance accounted for occurs in the “expenditures” bucket, rather than in the “investment” bucket. We can also see that most subnational government climate finance is happening at the local level, rather than the state level in the OECD dataset.

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Recognizing these patterns, I wanted to see which countries have the most significant climate finance at the local level, at both the aggregate and per capita levels. While Luxembourg is the biggest local climate spender by capita, Japan is the top local climate spender overall in the OECD. I will add in specific percentages here before we turn this in.

##Next steps: Ideally, I hope to track city climate spending against city level emissions and population growth, but there are certainly data limitations on local level emissions data that complicates this research. If time allows before the final, I will focus on a few countries and their biggest cities’ emission data.

##Limitations: Unsurprisingly, there are several data limitations involved in this study. First, while the OECD dataset appears to be the most comprehensive database in existence on subnational climate finance, it inherently excludes these figures for most developing countries, which is where both urbanization and climate impacts are projected to hit the hardest.

The OECD dataset does not track specific cities, only the level of government, ie, a local government in X country spend YY on climate finance. This sheds light on the importance/scale of local involvement in climate finance, but does not necessarily describe specific cities, especially in cases of countries that are not dominated by a primate city. In my next iteration, I might pick a country to focus on with a primate city that has published emissions data to show the kind of analysis we might be able to do with better data.