ClimActor 2.0: A spatialized database of subnational climate pledges and emissions data

Abstract

ClimActor 2.0 is an open, spatialized database that compiles climate targets, action plans, and self-reported emission inventories from subnational governments, including cities, municipalities, states and regions, worldwide. The dataset provides standardized administrative boundaries for each entity, enabling direct linkage to geospatial data such as population, GDP, land cover, and other globally-gridded datasets. Each record is anchored to a unique identifier that connects decision-making authorities to their corresponding geometries. The database integrates information from 14 major climate disclosure platforms and reporting initiatives, complemented with a few national-level datasets. In total, ClimActor includes over 15,000 entities that participate in a national or transnational climate initiative, of which more than 10,000 of these entities have adopted either a climate mitigation target or plan. In addition to the harmonized spatial boundaries, ClimActor 2.0 provides four harmonized core datasets: aggregated emissions, sectoral emissions, climate targets, and climate plans, in addition to network participation data. Users can utilize the data as a standalone dataset or as an open-source R statistical computing software package, which includes a set of cleaning and matching functions that allow users to easily combine other datasets with ClimActor 2.0 for a wide range of subnational climate action analyses.