Governing Carbon and Climate in the Cities: An Overview of Policy and Planning Challenges and Options

Urban centres play a crucial role in managing global carbon emissions (mitigation) and reducing vulnerability to climate change (adaptation). This paper describes some of the mitigation and adaptation entry points and challenges for city-relevant planning and policy-making posed by the processes defining urban greenhouse gas emissions, vulnerabilities and adaptive capacities. It finds that although many cities are already responding to the climate challenge, existing initiatives are fragmented and a piecemeal rather than a strategic approach is very common. Frequently mitigation and adaptation responses do not address many of the key drivers and determinants involved (e.g. consumption patterns and equity issues determining differentiated access to the determinants of adaptive capacity), nor do they fit with the issues they are intended to address. This is so because climate responses and the issues they are intended to address are multi-scale in nature because most of the processes involved operate at multiple sectoral, temporal and spatial levels. In the face of the complexity of the interconnected processes involved in the relationships between cities and climate change, it is not surprising that local authorities tend to move towards rhetoric rather than meaningful responses.