Cities are at the forefront of climate impacts, and city governments are key actors in unlocking action to build urban resilience and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In recent years, the number of cities and regions committing to climate action and net zero has increased significantly, but many of them are struggling to translate that ambition into action at the necessary pace.
Campinas, Brazil is a good illustration of how cities are working to integrate urban climate action into all aspects of city life. Campinas has also demonstrated how to enable rapid implementation through a focus on three essential elements: making climate action about people, prioritizing an integrated implementation and getting the right people together.
Campinas’s Local Climate Action Plan
Campinas is a sunny city in southeastern Brazil, and home to over 1 million residents. As with many cities worldwide, it is pioneering sustainable urban development that addresses the climate emergency.
In June 2024, the Campinas city government launched its Local Climate Action Plan (PLAC). Scientific evidence and extensive engagement underpinned the creation of the plan, which lays out 20 actions and 96 sub-actions the city government will take to reach its goals of becoming a climate-resilient community, achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and creating multiple benefits for climate, people and nature.
Campinas’s plan also includes several unique aspects that set it apart from other city-level climate action plans.
An Integrated, People-Centered Approach
The development of PLAC reflects the city’s approach to climate action which connects climate priorities with nature and, critically, people. It communicates an understanding that climate action must put community at the center, and focus on enhancing quality of life for current and future residents.
In the Campinas process, an important starting point was identifying existing policies — plans in areas such as mobility, housing and civil defense — that contribute to climate-related objectives, even if not explicitly labeled as such. A group composed of city officials (supported by WRI) then brought together stakeholders, including a wider city-level multi-departmental group, for workshops to explore how to build on initial momentum and identify opportunities to raise ambition or develop new measures. They later assessed these measures against updated evidence on future climate hazards and greenhouse gas emissions, which allowed them to come to a final list of key and urgent integrated climate actions.
This approach treated climate action as an intrinsic part of urban development and city systems, rather than as an isolated effort. As a result, the plan is structured around five pillars, or axes, which collectively outline how Campinas must transform its urban systems. Officials designed actions and sub-actions to achieve synergies between adaptation, mitigation, social inclusion (including bridging the urban services divide) and the restoration of natural ecosystems. They also considered and analyzed tradeoffs.
The axes of Campinas Local Climate Action Plan embody the urban transformations the city wants to achieve for climate resilience, mitigation and improving conditions for both people and nature.
A Roadmap for Early Implementation
The process in Campinas was guided by the belief that the timely realization of some aspects of climate action plans — such as unlocking funds, building technical capacity, modifying or creating related laws, regulations and policy and engaging stakeholders and citizens — can enable faster implementation.
Campinas considered PLAC’s actions in this context, leveraging the expertise of a multidisciplinary group. As the final step in developing the plan, the city created an innovative roadmap that identified roughly 130 short-term activities necessary to unlock action. This roadmap serves as a practical guide for the city team, outlining important steps to ensure feasibility with a focus on the 2032 horizon. Beyond detailing what needs to be done, it also lists the secretariats responsible for each action and important conclusion dates.
For example, the climate action plan includes a series of measures for promoting active mobility in order to transition the Urban Mobility and Sustainable Transport Systems. One measure is the expansion of 150 km of cycling infrastructure in Campinas by 2030, which involves the installation of drinkable water stops and developing shaded areas in key public areas of the city to protect cyclists from the extreme heat. To unlock this, the team mapped necessary short-term steps, including establishing guidelines for the implementation of cycling infrastructure, a priority activity for 2024 that the city team has been actively working on. Other important next steps include:
- Engage and hold a dialogue session with cycling associations, entrepreneurs and municipal authorities involved with cycling infrastructure by June 2025
- Ensure the provision of financial resources in the municipal budget by December 2025
- Revise the Municipal Cycling Plan and include necessary changes, by 2027
Bring the Right People Together, Avoiding a Governance Gap
Comprehensive climate action requires the right people come together to make decisions. Acknowledging the importance of governance, Campinas’s officials didn’t wait for the planning process to introduce a decree that created the Municipal Committee for Coping with Climate Change Impacts (Climate Committee). And, with the support of the city’s mayor, it was operational before the PLAC was completed. This avoided a governance gap between planning and implementation, and helped to quickly put the plan into action.
|
Campinas’s Municipal Committee for Coping with the Impacts of Climate Change |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
| Municipal government holders in portfolios linked to climate issues | Technical representatives from involved municipal agencies | Representatives of civil society, including from academia, trade unions, business, popular and third- sector entities |
Linked to the Municipal Civil Defense to respond to extreme events and support the Management Group in decision-making
|
Campinas’s Climate Committee’s forward thinking allows participative spaces where multiple actors can come together to debate topics around climate change and PLAC implementation. It also predicts the creation of permanent groups looking at specific topics or sectors, known as thematic chambers. They gather through meetings where businesses, NGOs, academia and vulnerable communities are actively involved in debating and expanding climate action. This is a public recognition that climate action is a shared responsibility, and acknowledges that the city government alone cannot drive city-wide change.
Implementation and the Road Ahead
In the six months that followed the decree publication, Campinas’s city team has kept the momentum going by engaging other levels of government, departments and civil society stakeholders in the plan’s implementation. Further research is needed to assess the impact of specific actions and to better understand the barriers and enabling factors.
A significant outcome so far has been the city’s increased visibility as a leader in local-level climate action, both nationally and internationally. Notably, the mayor of Campinas attended COP29 in Azerbaijan, where he participated in debates on multilevel climate governance and sought partnerships to advance PLAC implementation. The timing has been important, as Brazil’s updated 2025 nationally determined contribution, or NDC, highlights the importance of collaborating with cities and subnational actors, building on its endorsement of the Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships (CHAMP) for Climate Action.
As for critical next steps, Campinas is prioritizing unlocking finance, starting with its own municipal budget. This effort includes aligning PLAC targets to the city’s financial planning and budget cycle, with particular emphasis on the Multi-Year Plan, known as the PPA in Portuguese, for 2026–2029, which it will draft in 2025. Integrating climate action into city financial decision-making and budgeting helps to embed climate priorities into the work of all departments and government agencies.
Through the Campinas Local Climate Action Plan, we see a positive example of how a city is turning promises into progress, unlocking climate action, and building a future where people, climate and nature are at the heart of urban life.
WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities has closely supported the city of Campinas in the elaboration of its Climate Action Plan. Our team provided technical support over 15 months for the “Rapid Roadmap for Integrated Climate Action,” a scalable approach that was piloted with the city. WRI Brasil has a long-standing relationship with Campinas. Since 2017, the team has provided technical support to urban mobility, nature-based solutions, biodiversity and forest conservation and restauration projects. In 2025, WRI Brasil will continue to support the city with technical support for the implementation of the PLAC, focusing on climate finance, electrification of the bus fleet and studying the link between local health and extreme heat.