Climate Initiatives and Innovation

A huge amount of information continues to be generated about climate change. The UN COP (Conference of the Parties) annual events are overall global events, and the usually have an urban focus in one way or another. For example, a team at COP28 announced in December 2023 new partnerships and initiatives to advance sustainable urban development.

A few bodies are described below (this section will be updated over time).

The Google Environmental Insights Explorer (EIE) is a freely available data and insights tool that uses data sources and modelling capabilities to help cities and regions measure their emissions sources. Through this tool it is possible to run analysis and identify strategies and actions to reduce emissions (sign-up rights to the EIE depends on your role / activity with cities).

Climate OS is new way to look at the full impact of your emission reduction activities. Quickly understand socio-economic impacts and collaboratively work to answer the necessary and difficult questions faced by your city with systemic analysis. Featured in the Guardian in 2023.

Cities Race to Zero is the official partner of the UN-backed Race to Zero campaign offering cities and local governments of all size a single entry-point to join this global effort to halve global emissions by 2030 and deliver a healthier, fairer zero carbon world in time.

The Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance (CNCA) is a collaboration of leading global cities working to achieve carbon neutrality in the next 10-20 years.

ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability - is a global network of more than 2,500 local and regional governments committed to sustainable urban development. They influence sustainability policy and local action for low emission, nature-based, equitable, resilient and circular development. 

GCoM is the largest global alliance for city climate leadership, built upon the commitment of over 11,500 cities and local governments. These cities hail from 6 continents and 142 countries. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change. 

The IPCC AR6 is a report produced by three Working Groups. The IPCC AR6 Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis (the first part of the overall report) was published on 9 August, 2021. The second part of AR6, focusing on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability was published on 28 February 2022 with the third part, focusing on Mitigation of Climate Change, published on 4 April 2022.

(this summary is by the author of this website, it is not an official IPCC summary)

Report I

The Physical Science Basis Working Group I (WGI) full report is a detailed review of the situation. The Summary for Policy Makers is the “top section” of the full report.

References to urban areas and cities in Physical Science Basis WGI part of AR6 are many and frequent, in both the summary section and threaded throughout the extensive background sections. 

• Point C.2.6 confirms how cities intensify human-induced warming locally, and that there is a “very high confidence” level that the continued growth in urbanisation together with more frequent hot extremes will increase the severity of heatwaves.
• Point C.2.6 also highlights how urbanisation increases both the mean and heavy precipitation over and/or downwind of cities (medium confidence) and resulting runoff intensity (high confidence). 
• The section states that there is a “high confidence” level that for coastal cities, the combination of more frequent extreme sea level events (due to sea level rise and storm surge) and extreme rainfall and riverflow events will make flooding more probable.
• In the detailed Technical Summary (TS) section of the report:
• Box TS.11 (Climate Services) stresses the need to consider the impact on urban drainage of the flooding prospects.
• TS.4.2.1 discusses how future urbanisation will amplify the projected air temperature under different background climates, with a strong effect on minimum temperatures.

Report II

In February 2022 the IPCC Working Group II published their report (the second part to AR6). Working Group II has assessed the impacts of climate change looking at ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities at global and regional levels (which has a very close linkage with urban environments). It also reviews vulnerabilities and the capacities and limits of the natural world and human societies to adapt to climate change. The report is wide-ranging, with 18 chapters covering different geographic regions of the world and a dedicated section on small islands and also specific aspects and elements such as water, food availability and people’s lives and seven cross-chapters that focus on specific topics. 

Report II contains a section on urban areas – Section 6: Cities, settlements and key infrastructure and a Cross-Chapter Paper, 2: Cities and settlements by the sea, which assesses climate change impacts and risks to coastal cities and settlements, their vulnerability and enabling conditions and options for adaptation. It also provides a section on risk management: Section 17: Decision-making options for managing risk, on how more transformational climate risk management and adaptation will be necessary as the world moves towards higher global warming levels. 

Report III  

Report III outlines ways in which agriculture, travel and the majority of industries (many of which are linked to urban environments) will have to significantly change. For the first time, it also discusses in detail how individuals could be encouraged to change their behaviour – which resonates with the socio-economic part of this framework. The potential options outlined by IPCC Working Group III to limit warming to 2°C depend on CO2 being removed from the atmosphere through a mixture of natural strategies, such as capturing it in trees and soils, and new (largely unproven) technologies which include capturing CO2 directly from the air and storing it underground.

Point C6 of the summary report is directly relevant to urban environments and the content of this framework, in that it states the following:

Urban areas can create opportunities to increase resource efficiency and significantly reduce GHG emissions through the systemic transition of infrastructure and urban form through low-emission development pathways towards net-zero emissions. Ambitious mitigation efforts for established, rapidly growing and emerging cities will encompass 1) reducing or changing energy and material consumption, 2) electrification, and 3) enhancing carbon uptake and storage in the urban environment. Cities can achieve net-zero emissions, but only if emissions are reduced within and outside of their administrative boundaries through supply chains, which will have beneficial cascading effects across other sectors.  

The famous stripes climate change diagram is available for us to use, to see the stripes as they relate to a specific area. Try it...

The State of Climate Action 2022 by the World Resources Institute provides a comprehensive assessment of the global gap in climate action across the world’s highest-emitting systems, highlighting where recent progress made in reducing GHG emissions, scaling up carbon removal, and increasing climate finance must accelerate over the next decade.

RMI is working with climate-critical cities around the world to simultaneously reduce emissions, enhance urban liveability, increase resilience, and advance social equity.