Yokohama is Japan’s largest municipality after Tokyo and is renowned for its historic port, cultural diversity, and thriving economy. Today, the city faces a range of critical urban challenges, including those posed by climate change.
On the mitigation front, Yokohama’s challenges include cutting greenhouse gas emissions, reducing energy consumption, curbing air and water pollution, managing waste, and preserving biodiversity. On the adaptation front, Yokohama must confront increasing risks such as heat stress and flooding. In response to these challenges, Yokohama has set an ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reduction target and implemented a wide array of policy initiatives across sectors.
This paper applies the OECD Territorial Approach to Climate Action and Resilience (TACAR) framework to benchmark Yokohama’s climate performance against other OECD cities, assess its current climate policy landscape according to the nine action areas outlined in the TACAR framework, and offer strategic policy recommendations to accelerate local climate action. This paper showcases Yokohama’s innovative, place-based climate initiatives, from the Minato Mirai 21 District decarbonisation project to their extensive programme of city-to-city co-operation. At the same time, it highlights global best practices on territorial climate action, offering valuable insights for policy makers in Yokohama and beyond.
