Cities account for ≈70% of global CO₂ emissions and are deeply intertwined with corporate value chains. The Gigaton Project's urban strategy creates synergistic pathways — transforming cities and corporations simultaneously into drivers of planetary healing.
While nations have made climate pledges, implementation remains severely insufficient to limit warming to 1.5°C. The gap between commitments and action continues to widen — but the solution lies precisely at the intersection of cities and corporate value chains.
Cities serve as concentrated consumption hubs for corporate goods and services, where increasing urban demand drives upstream value chain activities across key industries. This creates a powerful leverage point: influencing Scope 3 emissions through city-corporate partnerships.
Top-down climate action is falling short — as highlighted at COP29, where discussions revealed the difficulty in mediating conflicting stakeholder interests. Non-state actors hold an estimated 18–21 GtCO₂e annual mitigation potential¹ that remains largely unlocked due to the absence of credible scientific and governance infrastructure.
The Gigaton Project's urban strategy addresses this directly: merging corporate net-zero blueprints (Phase 1 — see our Corporations page) with city-specific decarbonisation strategies, creating synergies across buildings, transport, and circular economy that neither stream can achieve alone.
Recent carbon market developments at COP29 also create new opportunities for city-corporate partnerships to access climate finance while addressing shared decarbonisation challenges — linking urban demand-side action with corporate supply-chain transformation.
Our urban strategy pursues six interconnected objectives — addressing the scientific and governance gaps that prevent cities and corporations from realising their combined mitigation potential.
Merge corporate industry-specific net-zero pathways (COMPASS) with city-specific decarbonisation strategies — creating integrated blueprints that address the shared emission reduction challenges of urban operations and corporate value chains simultaneously.
Extend the CLARITY emission factor harmonisation framework to city-level and urban-sector accounting — addressing the same inconsistent emissions accounting that afflicts corporations, but within urban system boundaries and municipal reporting frameworks.
Develop the scientific infrastructure needed for cities and corporations to jointly access post-COP29 carbon markets — creating verified, high-integrity city-corporate carbon finance mechanisms that reward genuine, measurable emissions reductions.
Provide the methodological tools to quantify how urban policies (building codes, mobility regulations, procurement standards) reduce corporate Scope 3 emissions in upstream value chains — creating a measurable, bidirectional city-corporate accountability framework.
Extend the CATALYST physical risk framework to urban infrastructure — quantifying how climate hazards (heat stress, flooding, water scarcity) affect city assets and the corporate operations embedded within them, enabling integrated adaptation planning.
The Gigaton Project's Cities & Regions programme will serve as the implementation catalyst connecting research to action — generating at least 2+ GtCO₂e annual emissions reductions within five years through actionable pathways that enable cities and non-state actors to become drivers of planetary healing.²
Cities and corporations share deeply intertwined emission systems. Addressing them jointly creates synergies unavailable to either acting alone.
Urban net-zero strategies for buildings enable corporations working in both operational and embodied energy to complement their net-zero journey — aligning urban building codes with corporate facility decarbonisation targets and supply chain material standards.
City-corporation partnerships in transport decarbonisation accelerate electric vehicle adoption in urban fleets — creating shared infrastructure investment models, demand aggregation for clean vehicles, and coherent last-mile logistics decarbonisation.
Circular economy innovations in CPG packaging logistics revolutionise urban resource cycles — minimising waste while creating new value chains that simultaneously reduce corporate Scope 3 Category 12 (end-of-life treatment) emissions.
Cities as downstream stakeholders for food corporations create leverage over upstream agricultural Scope 3 emissions — urban food procurement standards, urban growing programmes, and short-supply-chain initiatives reduce AI infrastructure companies' most material emission categories.
Shared urban-corporate water infrastructure risk — particularly in water-stressed cities — creates aligned incentives for joint investment in efficiency, recycling, and nature-based solutions that deliver both operational resilience and measurable environmental outcomes.
Post-COP29 carbon market frameworks create opportunities for city-corporate partnerships to jointly access Article 6 carbon markets — with cities providing verified emission reductions and corporations providing the capital and supply chain reach to scale them.
Cities and corporations face fundamentally similar roadblocks to unlocking their decarbonisation potential — which is precisely why addressing them jointly creates greater impact than addressing either in isolation.
Both cities and corporations lack standardised, comparable emissions measurement frameworks — leading to incompatible baselines, unreliable progress tracking, and inability to verify genuine reductions.
Generic targets divorced from local sectoral realities, urban form, economic structure, and supply chain composition create undeliverable commitments with no accountability mechanism.
Corporations and cities both lack operational, peer-reviewed tools to quantify emission reduction potential, cost curves, and pathway feasibility at the granularity required for genuine climate action.
Access to climate finance, investment in enabling infrastructure, and operational capacity constraints affect cities and corporations alike — particularly in emerging market contexts where mitigation potential is highest.
The Gigaton Project's urban strategy builds in three deliberate phases — each grounded in the scientific infrastructure developed in the phase before it.
Building CLARITY, COMPASS, and CATALYST — the foundational peer-reviewed tools for corporate Scope 3 accounting, pathway benchmarks, and physical risk intelligence. AI Infrastructure proof-of-concept, scalable globally.
Seeking Funding · Corporations PageMerging corporate net-zero blueprints with city-specific decarbonisation strategies. Developing urban emissions accounting, city-corporate synergy quantification, and joint climate finance mechanisms.
Planned · Funding to be SecuredExtending beyond carbon to water, biodiversity, land-use, and ocean health — building a comprehensive planetary stewardship framework for non-state actors at regional and global scale. 2+ GtCO₂e equivalent impact targeted annually.
Planned · Vision StageThe Cities & Regions programme is currently in the design and funding phase. We are actively seeking partnerships with urban research institutions, city governments, and funders who share this vision.
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