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Six research priorities for cities and climate change

Xuemei Bai and colleagues call for long-term, cross-disciplinary studies to reduce carbon emissions and urban risks from global warming.
  1. Xuemei Bai

    1. Xuemei Bai is professor of urban environment and human ecology at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.

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  2. Richard J. Dawson

    1. School of Engineering, Newcastle University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK.

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  3. Diana Ürge-Vorsatz

    1. Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.

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  4. Gian C. Delgado

    1. Interdisciplinary Research Center on Sciences and Humanities, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico.

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  5. Aliyu Salisu Barau

    1. Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Bayero University Kano, Nigeria.

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  6. Shobhakar Dhakal

    1. Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Change, Asian Institute of Technology, Klong Luang, Pathumthani, Thailand.

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  7. David Dodman

    1. International Institute for Environment and Development, London, UK.

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  8. Lykke Leonardsen

    1. Program for Resilient and Sustainable City Solutions, City of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.

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  9. Valérie Masson-Delmotte

    1. IPSL/LSCE (CEA-CNRS-UVSQ), Université Paris Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France.

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  10. Debra C. Roberts

    1. eThekwini Municipality; KwaZulu-Natal; and School of Life Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa.

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  11. Seth Schultz

    1. C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, New York City, New York, USA.

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Cities must address climate change. More than half of the world’s population is urban, and cities emit 75% of all carbon dioxide from energy use1. Meeting the target of the 2015 Paris climate agreement to keep warming well below 2° C above pre-industrial levels requires staying within a ‘carbon budget’ and emitting no more than around 800 gigatonnes of CO2 in total after 2017. Yet bringing the rest of the world up to the same infrastructure level as developed countries (those listed as Annex 1 to the Kyoto Protocol) by 2050 could take up to 350 gigatonnes of the remaining global carbon budget2. Much of this growth will be in cities in the developing world (see ‘Urban development challenge’).

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Nature 555, 23-25 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-02409-z

References

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