External publications

A global response to climate change: in, through, and for cities?

Chan, Sander / David Gordon / Emma Lecavalier / Craig Johnson / Angel Hsu / Fee Stehle / Thomas Hickmann / Jennifer Bansard / Paty Romero-Lankao
External Publications (2018)

published on duckofminerva.com 2018-04-06

Volltext/Document

Cities have been wildly successful over recent years in positioning themselves at the center of the global conversation on climate change. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently convened the Cities & Climate Change Conference (CitiesIPCC) in Edmonton, Alberta. The conference — hosted by a city that once advertised itself as Canada’s oil capital — brought together a diverse constellation of academics, practitioners, and policy-makers to shape a forward-looking research agenda centered around sustainable transformation to meeting global climate goals in, by, and through cities.

Recognizing the pivotal role cities have come to play in global climate politics, where they were almost invisible until the early 2000’s, we strongly support the aim of CitiesIPCCC to set a transformative research agenda on cities and climate change. However, we want to call attention that current approaches are likely to fall short and have limited value in responding to fundamental questions of social context and urban capacity.