Cities and Climate Change: The role of institutions, governance and urban planning.

The aim of this report is to provide an overview of the current state of knowledge about urban governance and planning for climate change. In undertaking this comparative review, the report provides a synopsis of the issues that are facing cities with respect to climate change mitigation and adaptation, in the north and in the south. While both rooted in the global problem of climate change, the challenges of mitigation and adaptation are significantly different. Mitigation reducing emissions of greenhouse gases has predominantly been driven by international and national policy agendas, and has focused on a few energy intensive sectors (e.g. energy, transportation). In contrast, adaptation is necessarily more locally differentiated, and involves a wider range of sectors and actors, operating across a range of timescales from very immediate issues of disaster relief tolong term investment decisions (McEvoy et al. 2006: 188). While at the international level, countries in the global south have argued for adaptation to be placed higher up the climate change agenda, somewhat surprisingly at the municipal level mitigation has remained the priority for cities north and south. Recognizing these different agendas and the challenges they bring, in this report we first review the literature to ascertain the challenges of urban governance and planning for climate change mitigation (Part II), before considering those issues that have been documented in urban responses to adapting to climate change (Part III).