Governance and Policy

New York City Panel on Climate Change 2019 Report Chapter 9: Perspectives on a City in a Changing Climate 2008–2018

“…These include physical changes in infrastructure such as higher seawalls for coastal cities (Dawson et al ., ) and the restructuring of water supply systems (Vicuña et al ., ); changes in decision making such as coordinating management strategies among overlapping jurisdictions (Romero‐Lankao et al ., ); incorporating urban planning and design (Raven et al ., ); and far‐reaching societal shifts such as disinvestment in highly vulnerable coastal sites and increased support for at‐risk populations such as the poor or elderly (Reckien et al ., ). These responses will inevitably also interact with other ongoing processes of societal and ecological transformation in large urbanized zones (Solecki et al ., ; McPhearson et al ., ).…”

Urban Responses to Climate Change in Latin America: Reasons, Challenges and Opportunities

“…Heat stress and respiratory distress from extreme temperatures coalesce with a reduction in air quality to create higher mortality in urban areas. 4 'Adaptive capacity', the ability of the urban population and economic activities to attenuate climate stresses or cope with their consequences, is as key a determinant of climate impacts as exposure is. Latin American cities have been struggling to provide their populations with many of the determinants of adaptive capacity.…”

“…A consequence of this is increased commuting distances and decreased speeds (for example, in Mexico City from 3.5 kilometres (2.2 miles) and 16.8 kilometres (10.4 miles) an hour by bus in 1987 to 5.6 kilometres (3.5 miles) and 16.7 kilometres (10.3 miles) an hour in 2000). 6 A 1 per cent increase in the density of urban areas relates to an approximately 0.7 per cent decline in CO 2 pollution at the city level, with other factors held constant. 7 The second reason, equity and affl uence, can be illustrated with data on transportation.…”

When opportunity backfires: exploring the implementation of urban climate governance alternatives in three major US cities

“…First, cities have begun to commit to progressive urban climate strategies (often more ambitious than those of the nation states to which they belong). Second, cities have embraced a wide variety of traditional and 'novel' urban climate governance instruments to achieve their ambitious climate change targets (for recent reviews of the literature, see among others Gordon, 2018;Hughes & Hoffmann, 2020;Lamb, Callaghan, Creutzig, Khosla, & Minx, 2018;Romero-Lankao, Burch, & Hughes, 2018;van der Heijden, 2019).…”