Cities on a Finite Planet: Towards Transformative Responses to Climate Change

Cities on a Finite Planet: Transformative responses to climate change shows how cities can combine high quality living conditions, resilience to climate change, disaster risk reduction and contributions to mitigation/low carbon development. It also covers the current and potential contribution of cities to avoiding dangerous climate change and is the first book with an in-depth coverage of how cities and their governments, citizens and civil society organizations can combine these different agendas, based on careful city-level analyses.

The foundation for the book is detailed city case studies on Bangalore, Bangkok, Dar es Salaam, Durban, London, Manizales, Mexico City, New York and Rosario. Each of these was led by authors who contributed to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment and are thus acknowledged as among the world’s top specialists in this field.

This book highlights where there is innovation and progress in cities and how this was achieved. Also where there is little progress and no action and where there is no capacity to act. It also assesses the extent to which cities can address the Sustainable Development Goals within commitments to also dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In this, it highlights how much progress on these different agendas depends on local governments and their capacities to work with their low-income populations.

Sheridan Bartlett is a research associate at the Children’s Environments Research Group at CUNY Graduate Center in New York, USA. She works primarily on issues of urban poverty as they affect children in low income countries, bridging the gaps between the work of child-focused agencies and the broader development context.

David Satterthwaite is a senior fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and a Visiting Professor at University College London, UK. He was a coordinating lead author of the chapter on urban areas in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment (Working Group II) and contributed to the IPCC’s Third and Fourth Assessments.