APPENDIX ■ 273City Indicators on Climate Change: Implications for Policy Leverage
and Governance
Patricia McCarney
Risks associated with climate change are increasingly fi nding expression in
cities. Issues of greenhouse gas emissions; sea temperature change; sea-level
change; land and air temperature adjustments; air quality deterioration; shift ing
rain, wind, and snow patterns; and other unstable climate shift s, while global in
nature, fi nd particular expression in the world’s cities. Th ese phenomena serve
to introduce new layers in our interpretation of urban risk, new complexities
in governing cities, and new research challenges to measure and monitor these
risks in order to inform policy, planning, and management. How do we address
this multiple layering and new complexity? Th e vulnerability of cities to cli-
mate change is largely underestimated. Th ere is no established or standardized
set of city indicators that measures the eff ects of climate change on cities and
assesses those risks, nor is there a comprehensive set of indicators with a com-
mon, accepted methodology designed to measure the impact that cities have
on climate change and the role that cities play, for example, in contributing to
greenhouse gas emissions.
Eff ective and long-term solutions must be anchored in an empowered city
governance approach that acknowledges the respective roles and contributions
of a wide array of actors. Addressing climate change risk in cities must also
be considered in a broader framework of risks confronting cities. Cities in the
21st century are facing unprecedented challenges. Th e world’s urban popula-
tion is likely to reach 4.2 billion by 2020, and the urban slum population is
expected to increase to 1.4 billion by 2020, meaning one out of every three
people living in cities will live in impoverished, overcrowded, and insecure liv-
ing conditions. Social cohesion, safety, security, and stability are being tested by
social exclusion, inequities, and shortfalls in basic services.
While the literature on urban governance is extensive and the research fi eld
of city indicators has grown and strengthened in very recent years, there is little
work to date on how city indicators can be used for improved governance. It
is the intersection of city indicators and city governance that this paper begins
to address.
Detecting Carbon Signatures of Development Patterns across a
Gradient of Urbanization: Linking Observations, Models, and Scenarios
Marina Alberti and Lucy Hutyra
Urbanizing regions are major determinants of global- and continental-scale
changes in carbon budgets through land transformation and modifi cation