Measuring the effectiveness of the Covenant of Mayors on the reporting of climate hazards by Municipalities

The European Commission established the Covenant of Mayors (CoM) initiative in 2008, aimed at involving and supporting mayors to encourage accomplishing the European Union (EU) climate mitigation and energy targets. In 2014, the Mayors Adapt initiative was set up in order to promote the climate adaptation pillar. Whereas the mitigation pillar is more developed and peer-reviewed literature can be found, adaptation is still lagging behind, not to mention the absence of information on the effectiveness of the CoM concerning the development of climate adaptation plans. This paper aims at presenting a thorough analysis of climate hazard data declared by CoM signatories as well as the degree of regional agreement of those signatories when reporting climate data. Thus, we assume that the signatories belonging to the same climate region should report similar climate hazard data for both current and future timeframes. Using a new statistical method for measuring the variability of categorical data, we determine that, overall, the signatories show low agreement within climate regions. Hence, we conclude that the CoM, in the corresponding part of climate risk assessment, is not as effective as it could be desired. Furthermore, several recommendations are proposed to improve the current reporting.