  The locality conditions for the vanishing of local anomalies in field theory
are shown to admit a geometrical interpretation in terms of local equivariant
cohomology, thus providing a method to deal with the problem of locality in the
geometrical approaches to the study of local anomalies based on the
Atiyah-Singer index theorem. The local cohomology is shown to be related to the
cohomology of jet bundles by means of the variational bicomplex theory. Using
these results and the techniques for the computation of the cohomology of
invariant variational bicomplexes in terms of relative Gel'fand-Fuks cohomology
introduced in [6], we obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for the
cancellation of local gravitational and mixed anomalies.
