Here’s how cities are tackling the risks of climate change

Mar 26, 2019

Students attend a protest rally to call for urgent action to slow the pace of climate change, in Los Angeles, California, U.S., March 15, 2019. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson - RC1CBAD2B080

We know far less about dealing with climate change in cities which are rapidly growing. Image: REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

William Lamb

Researcher, Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change

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Climate Change

Total number of papers published that include an urban climate mitigation case study, arranged by date of publication (according to which IPCC assessment report it is eligible for) and region on the world (see legend for colours). Image: William Lamb

Number of urban climate mitigation case studies, grouped according to city size. The 12 most frequently studied cities are labelled. Population data from UN World Urbanisation Prospects (2018 revision), using agglomeration data where available. Image: William Lamb

Map of global coverage of urban case studies (shown by grey circles). The larger the circle, the more case studies there are for that city. For each continent, the topic distribution of associated case studies is summarised, and the highest (blue circles) and lowest (pink circles) scoring topics are shown. Image: Lamb et al. (2019)

Have you read?

Grid of number of mitigation studies by topic for the 10 cities with the most publications. The dark blue shading indicates the main topic focus of case study literature within each city. Note, because our literature search included keywords only for climate mitigation, indicated studies are not comprehensive, particularly where large and relevant sectoral literatures exist but are not yet framed in terms of emissions reductions (for example, transport). Image: Lamb et al. (2019)

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