Critical Analysis of Urban climate adaptation and mitigation action plans

A recent study on climate action is published by Ayyoob Sharifi who is one of the MIRAI Resilient Cities Global Challenges Team and Prince Dacosta Aboagye in the journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews. The study focuses on urban climate action planning, proposing a new framework and testing it on 257 urban climate action plans. The authors developed an Urban Climate Action Planning framework with 43 criteria across three planning stages. Testing revealed that over half of the sampled plans had medium suitability, while 39% had weak suitability. Surprisingly, plans from Africa and Latin America showed better performance than expected, despite less funding. The study found significant associations between planning stages and city types, as well as between plan adoption year and suitability scores. More recent plans (2018-2022) tended to be more suitable than older ones, and plans from the Global South had higher average suitability scores than those from the Global North. The study provides insights into the current state of urban climate action planning and offers considerations for future planning and research in this area.

For more information see: Aboagye, P. D., & Sharifi, A. (2024). Urban climate adaptation and mitigation action plans: A critical review. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 189, 113886.

Another related work is Aboagye, P. D., & Sharifi, A. (2023). Post-fifth assessment report urban climate planning: Lessons from 278 urban climate action plans released from 2015 to 2022. Urban Climate, 49, 101550.