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Jointly with the Global North, the rise of the Global South has come at a high cost to the environment. Driven by its high energy intensity and the use of fossil fuels, the South has contributed a significant portion of global emissions during the last 30 years, and is now contributing some 63% of today's total GHG emissions (including land-use change and forestry). Similar to the Global North, the Global South's emissions are heavily concentrated: India and China alone account for some 60% and the top 10 countries for some 78% of the group's emissions, while some 120 countries account for only 22%. Without highlighting such differences, it makes little sense to use the term 'Global South'. Its members are affected differently, and contribute differently to global climate change. They neither share a common view, nor do they pursue joint interests when it comes to international climate negotiations. Instead, they are organised into more than a dozen subgroups of the global climate regime. There is no single climate strategy for the Global South, and climate action will differ enormously from country to country. Furthermore, just and equitable transitions may be particularly challenging for some countries.
Since the 1980s, central governments have decentralized forestry to local governments in many countries of the Global South. More recently, REDD+ has started to impact forest policy-making in these countries by providing incentives to ensure a national-level approach to reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. Höhne et al. analyze to what extent central governments have rebuilt capacity at the national level, imposed regulations from above, and interfered in forest management by local governments for advancing REDD+. Using the examples of Brazil and Indonesia, the chapter illustrates that while REDD+ has not initiated a large-scale recentralization in the forestry sector, it has supported the reinforcement and pooling of REDD+ related competences at the central government level.
The past two decades have witnessed widespread scholarly interest in the role of cities in climate policy-making. This research has considerably improved our understanding of the local level in the global response to climate change. The present article synthesizes the literature on local climate policies with respect to the 1.5 degrees C target. While most studies have focused on pioneering cities and networks, we contend that the broader impacts of local climate actions and their relationship to regional, national, and international policy frameworks have not been studied in enough detail. Against this backdrop, we introduce the concept of upscaling and contend that local climate initiatives must go hand in hand with higher-level policies and be better integrated into the multi-level governance system.