Cities and Climate Change - Special Issue from "Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability"

New Cities and Climate Change special issue of Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, edited by Patricia Romero-Lankao and David Dodman, which just went on line.

Urban centres of different sizes play a crucial role in managing global carbon emissions and reducing vulnerability to climate change.

The papers in this issue provide an analytical review of the carbon and climate relevance of urbanization and of some of the interactions between urbanization and global environmental change. The authors' insights are used to inform a more general set of reflections on the nature of urban and global environmental change, and the linkages between the two.

Three over-arching themes are identified:

• vulnerability and resilience as the central concepts shaping urban responses to climate change;
• the growing role of specific governance mechanisms and systems at different scales in shaping the design and implementation of responses; and
• the particularities, cross-cutting issues and connections between cities from different regions (e.g., Europe, East Africa) in addressing this challenge.

Notwithstanding the rapidly growing volume of information on this area of research, the challenge will be to develop frameworks to understand and effectively respond to the complex interactions between urban development, the carbon cycle and the climate system, and to turn the hazards resulting from human pressures on the environment into sources of opportunities and innovations aimed at building more resilient and sustainable cities.

**** Forwarded from PERN