Urban climate change governance and hot and arid zones

This report, published by the Earthna Centre for a Sustainable Future, focuses on the important situations and roles of cities with respect to climate change.

Cities are increasingly perceived as being both more vulnerable to and a key part of the solution to the challenges of climate change, unsustainability and inadequate resilience. However, current city-making policies and methods are not explicitly designed to meet these challenges in a progressively diverse set of contexts. Hot and arid cities face compounded challenges due to the increasingly extreme nature of their environment and the carbon-intense nature of the conventional technologies required to enable cooling solutions, water, and food provision.

Cities are also crucial to developing solutions to these challenges. But cities acting alone are generally less effective than working through knowledge and expertise-sharing processes and networks.

The report has been influential in the recent establishment of an Arid Cities Network (ACN), a city-level partnership and community of practice to accelerate the delivery of sustainable and resilient solutions at the regional and/ or global scales for hot and arid cities, which are currently underrepresented in other city networks.

The report also feeds into the Climate Governance Commission recommendation to boost and expand such city and regional alliances.