Ranking global cities based on economic performance and climate change mitigation

Addressing climate change is an important and inevitable issue for global cities. This paper evaluates and ranks global cities based on economic performance and climate change mitigation using data envelopment analysis (DEA). Regular and super-efficiency DEA models are developed under natural disposability and managerial disposability, implying different priorities given to economy and climate change. We apply the models to a dataset of 39 global cities obtained from the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, the biggest coalition of global cities to coordinate the cities' mitigation efforts. The greenhouse gas emissions are classified into scopes 1-3, all of which are treated as undesirable outputs in DEA. In regular DEA models, we identify nine cities that achieve perfect efficiencies regardless of the disposability framework. In super-efficiency models, three cities (Sydney, Tokyo, Vancouver) are always placed into the top five positions. Buenos Aires and Cape Town always fall into the bottom five. The rankings with only scope 1 emissions are significantly correlated with those of all emissions, though with a few notable exceptions (Vancouver and Bogota). The performance of African cities is impeded by scope 2 and scope 3 emissions. The ranking results can be linked to the cities' economic structure and energy mix.