City Climate Change Mitigation Policy: A Methodological Perspective on the Implementation of the Kuala Lumpur Low Carbon Society Blueprint (KL LCSBP) 2030

Abstract

There is a lack of a clear and systematic methodology on how to go about implementing climate change policy at the city level. Therefore, this paper attempts to showcase the policy implementation steps and process taken by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall (KLCH), which adopted a 10-Action, 245-Program Kuala Lumpur Low Carbon Society Blueprint (KL LCSBP) 2030 in November 2017 to mitigate the city’s Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. To obtain stakeholders’ views and feedback, two sessions of focus group discussion have been conducted with 120 participants from various agencies including KLCH internal departments, government technical agencies, private entities and non-government organizations. Apart from the weighted scoring method which was used for evaluating the significance level of programs for implementation, most of the data were descriptively analyzed. Results show that out of the total of 245 programs, 163 Low Carbon Society (LCS) programs (over 66%) scored high in importance for implementation and only nine LCS programs were considered as low in importance. As for the implementation timeline, 154 LCS programs (63 %) were identified to be implemented immediately and considered as long-term programs which entail that they should be implemented continuously. This paper offers a clear methodological guide and a step forward in LCS policy implementation (i.e., policy roadmap) which can be used as an example by other cities.