Enabling climate change action in cities: A systematic assessment of conditions

Abstract

Progress toward low-carbon, resilient cities remains a complex and evolving challenge. Enabling conditions, which are the institutional, economic, and social factors that shape the pace and depth of climate action, are central to understanding why some cities can advance more rapidly than others towards sustainable development pathways. While abundant technical and social response options exist, increasing the pace and scale at which these solutions are deployed in cities requires a nuanced and place-based understanding of these enabling conditions. Multiple enabling conditions influence the pace and depth of that progress, including dynamics of multi-level governance, both technical and non-technical capacities, policy and legal instruments, behaviour and values, and funding and finance. Drawing from a pool of over 120,000 scientific peer-reviewed articles, we quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed a subset of 261 articles to uncover patterns in enabling conditions and their relative influence on urban climate change action. We found that effective urban climate action relies on coordination and mutual support among institutional, economic, and social factors, although the specific setup varies by urban environment, geography, and sector. Urban climate action may accelerate when multi-stakeholder governance structures, aligned economic incentives, and inclusive community engagement converge and mutually reinforce one another. Governance structures at various scales emerge as a foundational enabler across the reviewed literature, though the specific arrangements vary considerably by context. Economic factors shape both the feasibility and scale of urban climate action, with financing mechanisms and cost-effectiveness considerations playing a prominent role, but appear to be insufficient without the presence of other enablers. The enablers we examined, including institutional, economic, and social factors, do not operate in isolation but interact through nexuses, sequential dependencies, and feedback loops. Policymakers and practitioners should strategically identify and invest in enablers that serve as leverage points for inclusive, innovative, and ambitious climate action in cities.