ASSESSMENTS

For Cities, Climate Change Is as Much Global as Local

Sep 29, 2017 | 09:15 GMT

A woman in a kayak paddles down a Houston road flooded in late August by rains from Hurricane Harvey.

(BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)

Highlights

The weakening of the Paris climate agreement, partly because of the U.S. administration's announcement that it would pull out of the accord, has heightened the role of cities and other subnational partners in climate action.
Cities are major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions and are among the most vulnerable to climatic events, but they also are emerging as significant problem solvers in climate change.
Growing transnational coalitions of cities have led the way in network governance to address climate change, but they must carefully form strategies for the future given that they operate in a system dominated by nation-states.

The devastation caused to the city of Houston by Hurricane Harvey was still in the news when Hurricane Irma struck a number of Caribbean islands before grazing dangerously past Tampa, Florida, and Hurricane Maria severely damaged Puerto Rico. Out of the glare of the international media, extreme rainfall in eastern India caused even greater damage, killing more than a thousand people. Global warming did not birth these storms. However, climate change effectively acts as a "threat multiplier." The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asserts that, going forward, climate change will make bigger storm surges, rising sea levels, heavy precipitation events and extreme heat waves "very likely" and will make more intense hurricanes "likely." Cities are major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions and are among the most vulnerable to climatic events. They also are increasingly emerging as significant problem-solvers in climate change....

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