Editor's Note: In this article, Wu Yanni and Zhou Qing'an, researchers from the Global Development and Health Communication Center at China's Tsinghua University, examine how local governments – long cast as mere implementers of national policy – are emerging as genuine innovators in addressing climate change and global health issues. Drawing on examples from local-level authorities that have pressed forward with climate action even as higher-level policy falters, they argue that the untold practices of local actors, particularly those from the developing world, represent a critical gap in the global knowledge commons. They call for these local stories to be systematically brought into the international discourse as a practical contribution to the collective effort to solve some of the most urgent challenges of our time.

From mid-April through May 2026, a devastating heatwave swept across South Asia, rewriting records. Temperatures breached 46 degrees Celsius across much of India, with Banda in Uttar Pradesh touching 48 degrees Celsius. Scientists confirmed that human-driven climate change made the heatwave three times more likely than it would have been before industrialization, exposing some 44 million people to dangerous heat. 

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the United States federal government has been rolling back climate regulations at an unprecedented pace, canceling electric vehicle tax credits, halting clean energy incentives and pivoting aggressively toward fossil fuel expansion.

The heatwave is a reminder that climate change is, at its core, a global health crisis. The 2025 Lancet Countdown report found that heat-related deaths have surged 23% since the 1990s, now reaching 546,000 a year, while the World Health Organization (WHO) projects an additional 250,000 deaths annually by the 2030s from malnutrition, malaria and heat stress alone. Yet as national-level responses to climate warming falter, some American cities and states have been quietly moving in the opposite direction. 

Denver, Colorado is implementing an inventive plan to build a thermal energy network for multiple large downtown buildings, drawing on heat recovered from sewage and geothermal sources to replace conventional fossil-fuel heating systems. Estimated to cost up to 75% less than other decarbonization approaches, the project is funded initially through city appropriations and state grants, with bonds and private capital to follow. 

Another example comes from Utah – a politically conservative state – where a coalition of cities and towns, large and small, joined forces to bring new renewable energy to the grid through a novel joint-procurement model, extending clean power from urban centers to rural communities, and offering a template others can follow.

These two cases prompt a fundamental reframing of who solves global problems. For years, debates over climate change, pandemic preparedness and global health governance have focused on the dynamics between national governments and international institutions – the Paris Agreement negotiations, WHO resolutions, G20 declarations. Local governments have typically been cast as implementers, not innovators. But these cases demonstrate that subnational actors possess something national governments sometimes lack: the urgency of proximity, the flexibility to experiment and the trust of the people closest to the problem. When national policy stalls, cities and communities often move faster to fill the gap. The cost of underestimating this is concrete: workable local solutions go unnoticed, existing local practices go untold, and the potential collective force available for solving global problems is quietly squandered.

This supply gap is particularly pronounced when it comes to practices from the developing world. 

China offers a compelling case in point. In recent years, many Chinese local governments have stepped onto the global stage, yet the dominant narrative framework remains cultural tourism and city branding. Meanwhile, the substantial local practices China has accumulated on climate and health are largely absent from the international discourse: fully electrified public bus fleet in Shenzhen, south China's Guangdong Province; green city planning model of Xiong'an New Area in north China's Hebei Province; carbon market pilots across multiple provinces; the long-term health partnerships Chinese local governments have built with communities in Africa and Southeast Asia through medical assistance teams and infectious disease cooperation, directly addressing climate-sensitive diseases in some of the world's most vulnerable populations. These are documented, internationally relevant cases, yet they are rarely, if ever, systematically brought into the international communication framework.

This absence carries a cost that operates on two levels. At the level of the global knowledge commons and policy effectiveness, when the international community discusses solutions to climate and health challenges, a conversation that cannot draw on the local experience of the world's largest developing country is an incomplete one – not because any single country's voice is missing, but because a diverse range of real-world solutions that could inform collective action goes unrepresented, and the knowledge base for concerted global response is correspondingly weakened. At the level of international engagement – for China and the Global South more broadly, to treat this absence merely as a question of communication technique is to underestimate what is at stake: the ability to participate in shaping narratives around global climate and health is ultimately what determines whether a country can build genuine knowledge exchange and cooperation with the international community in these fields.

Bringing local practice into international communication is therefore not simply a question of how to tell China's story more effectively. It is a practical requirement for contributing to global problem-solving. The strength of local storytelling lies precisely in its concreteness: an account of how a city protected its elderly residents during extreme heat, or how a county reduced rural poverty and disease burden through a clean energy project, tends to move international audiences more deeply – and travel further – than macro-level policy declarations.

Local action cannot replace national policy, but it can accumulate evidence, demonstrate what is possible, and prepare ready-made solutions for the next policy window. Telling these local stories clearly and honestly is both a contribution to the global knowledge commons and a pathway to more substantive international engagement – two objectives that, in the end, serve the same purpose: solving the problem.