Elements in Climate Change and Cities – serie

Cities have suffered from three years of the COVID-19 pandemic and are increasingly experiencing exacerbated heatwaves, floods, and droughts due to climate change. Going forward, cities need to address both climate and public health crises effectively while reducing poverty and inequity, often in the context of economic pressure and declining levels of trust in government. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed gaps in city readiness for simultaneous responses to pandemics and climate change, particularly in the Global South. However, these concurrent challenges to cities present an opportunity to reformulate current urbanization patterns and the economies and dynamics they enable. This Element focuses on understanding COVID-19's impact on city systems related to climate change mitigation and adaptation, and vice versa, in terms of warnings, lessons learned, and calls to action. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Cities have suffered from three years of the COVID-19 pandemic and are increasingly experiencing exacerbated heatwaves, floods, and droughts due to climate change. Going forward, cities need to address both climate and public health crises effectively while reducing poverty and inequity, often in the context of economic pressure and declining levels of trust in government. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed gaps in city readiness for simultaneous responses to pandemics and climate change, particularly in the Global South. However, these concurrent challenges to cities present an opportunity to reformulate current urbanization patterns and the economies and dynamics they enable. This Element focuses on understanding COVID-19's impact on city systems related to climate change mitigation and adaptation, and vice versa, in terms of warnings, lessons learned, and calls to action. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Climate impacts and risk, within and across cities, are distributed highly unequally. Cities located in low latitudes are more vulnerable to climate risk and impacts than in high latitudes, due to the large proportion of informal settlements relative to the housing stock and more frequent extremes. According to EM-DAT, about 60% of environmental disasters in cities relate to riverine floods. Riverine floods and heatwaves cause about 33% of deaths in cities. However, cold-waves and droughts impact most people in cities (42% and 39% of all people, respectively). Human vulnerability intersects with hazardous, underserved communities. Frequently affected groups include women, single parents, and low-income elderly. Responses to climatic events are conditioned by the informality of social fabric and institutions, and by inequitable distribution of impacts, decision-making, and outcomes. To ensure climate-resilient development, adaptation and mitigation actions must include the broader urban context of informality and equity and justice principles. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Climate impacts and risk, within and across cities, are distributed highly unequally. Cities located in low latitudes are more vulnerable to climate risk and impacts than in high latitudes, due to the large proportion of informal settlements relative to the housing stock and more frequent extremes. According to EM-DAT, about 60% of environmental disasters in cities relate to riverine floods. Riverine floods and heatwaves cause about 33% of deaths in cities. However, cold-waves and droughts impact most people in cities (42% and 39% of all people, respectively). Human vulnerability intersects with hazardous, underserved communities. Frequently affected groups include women, single parents, and low-income elderly. Responses to climatic events are conditioned by the informality of social fabric and institutions, and by inequitable distribution of impacts, decision-making, and outcomes. To ensure climate-resilient development, adaptation and mitigation actions must include the broader urban context of informality and equity and justice principles. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

While global financial capital is abundant, it flows into corporate investments and real estate rather than climate change actions in cities. Political will and public pressure are crucial to redirecting funds. Studies of economic impacts underestimate the costs of climate disasters, especially in cities, so they undermine political commitments while understating potential climate-related returns. The shift of corporate approaches towards incorporating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) impacts offers promise for private-sector climate investments but are recently contested. Institutional barriers remain at all levels, particularly in African cities. Since the Global North controls the world's financial markets, new means of increasing funding for the Global South are needed, especially for adaptation. Innovative financial instruments and targeted use of environmental insurance tools can upgrade underdeveloped markets and align urban climate finance with ESG frameworks. These approaches, however, require climate impact data collection, programs to improve cities' and countries' creditworthiness, and trainings. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

While global financial capital is abundant, it flows into corporate investments and real estate rather than climate change actions in cities. Political will and public pressure are crucial to redirecting funds. Studies of economic impacts underestimate the costs of climate disasters, especially in cities, so they undermine political commitments while understating potential climate-related returns. The shift of corporate approaches towards incorporating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) impacts offers promise for private-sector climate investments but are recently contested. Institutional barriers remain at all levels, particularly in African cities. Since the Global North controls the world's financial markets, new means of increasing funding for the Global South are needed, especially for adaptation. Innovative financial instruments and targeted use of environmental insurance tools can upgrade underdeveloped markets and align urban climate finance with ESG frameworks. These approaches, however, require climate impact data collection, programs to improve cities' and countries' creditworthiness, and trainings. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Embedding climate resilient development principles in planning, urban design, and architecture means ensuring that transformation of the built environment helps achieve carbon neutrality, effective adaptation, and well-being for people and nature. Planners, urban designers, and architects are called to bridge the domains of research and practice and evolve their agency and capacity, developing methods and tools consistent across spatial scales to ensure the convergence of outcomes towards targets. Shaping change necessitates an innovative action-driven framework with multi-scale analysis of urban climate factors and co-mapping, co-design, and co-evaluation with city stakeholders and communities. This Element provides analysis on how urban climate factors, system efficiency, form and layout, building envelope and surface materials, and green/blue infrastructure affect key metrics and indicators related to complementary aspects like greenhouse gas emissions, impacts of extreme weather events, spatial and environmental justice, and human comfort. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.