Town Hall COPs
What are Town Hall COPs?
A Town Hall COP is a dynamic community engagement platform bringing COP-style discussions to cities, towns, and regions. Basically, it is a COP brought to the local level, bringing administration, experts, local stakeholders and civil society together to assess and discuss climate change, climate mitigation, adaptation and loss & damage in a condensed format.
At a Town-Hall-COP, elected leaders, staff of administrations and constituents discuss how they can elevate their ambition and action. The outcomes will be reported to both the respective national government in order to be integrated, as appropriate, in the next Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC3.0) due at COP30 in November 2025 and via the LGMA Constituency engagement at the UNFCCC.
From local stocktakes to Town Hall COPs
Town Hall COPs were piloted in 2023 under the brand of Stocktake4ClimateEmergency, or “Local Stocktake,” linking the initiative to the Global Stocktake under the Paris Agreement, a critical mechanism for assessing global progress on climate goals to which these local stocktakes contributed directly.
The Town Hall COPs have since become a way for local governments to assess their climate progress, share insights, and collaborate with national governments. This process fosters multilevel governance — meaning that local, regional, and national governments work together, sharing responsibilities for implementing climate action. Importantly, Town Hall COPs help integrate local voices into global climate policies, particularly countries’ Paris Agreement plans, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).
How Town Hall COPs fit into the current global climate arena
Just as the annual UN climate conference serves as a negotiation space for nations, local-level Town Hall COPs give communities the chance to assess climate action and negotiate their own path forward. The LGMA — as focal point to the UNFCCC for cities and regions — serves as a bridge between Town Hall COPs, national governments and associations, and the UN.
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Town Hall COPs empower local actors to contribute to global climate negotiations and accelerate climate action by bridging local efforts with national and international frameworks (see Figure). This collaboration is vital for enhancing the ambition of future NDCs, which will be updated before COP30 in 2025.
The initiative is also aligned with the CHAMP (Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships) framework, launched at COP28, which seeks to strengthen collaboration across all levels of government. By engaging local authorities and incorporating their feedback into national climate strategies, this entire process strives to ensure that climate targets are not only ambitious but also realistically implementable.
Example Town-Hall-COP agenda
- Welcome: Cultural moment, opening statements from youth, indigenous and/or disadvantaged communities
- Paris Agreement and National Policy Overview
- Local Policy Overview
- Breakout Discussion: How do we address justice? How can the national government support our community goals?
- Concluding Remarks
References and further readings
- Cities can bring CHAMP to life
- Stocktake4climateemergency-outcomes-report –
- Insights from Daring Cities 2024 Bonn Dialogues and two weeks of UNFCCC negotiations in Bonn, Germany –
- ICLEI World Congress 2024 – Empowering local voices to tackle the climate emergency
- Daring Cities 2024 Virtual Forum – CHAMP and Town-Hall-COPs
The vision: Annual mini-COPs in hundreds of cities
The LGMA envisions a future where 100+ communities each year around the world can actively engage in the UNFCCC processes — without ever leaving their home towns. Town Hall COPs empower youth, Indigenous Peoples, the business community, academia, and the most climate-vulnerable to join alongside their local and regional governments to accelerate climate action. As the link between local, regional, and national governments, as well as the UNFCCC, the LGMA can serve to facilitate interactions between local climate plans and NDCs.
We face a particularly strategic opportunity in the leadup to COP30 in Belem, when Paris Agreement signatory countries will deliver their next round of NDCs. Town Hall COPs held between Urban October 2024 and Earth Day 2025 can meaningfully inform this NDC cycle and set a course for annual mini-COPs for years to come.
