This paper considers the needed adaptation and mitigation agenda for cities in India — where the urban population is likely to grow by around 500 million over the next 50 years. It considers the likely changes that climate change will bring in temperature, precipitation and extreme rainfall, drought, river and inland flooding, storms/storm surges/coastal flooding, sea-level rise and environmental health risks, and who within urban populations are most at risk. It notes the importance for urban areas of an effective rural adaptation agenda — especially in maintaining the productivity and functioning of rural systems. It highlights the importance of today's infrastructure investments, taking into account climate changes, given the long lifespan of most infrastructure, and the importance of urban management engaging with changing risk profiles. One important part of this is the need to connect official adaptation initiatives to the much-improved natural hazard risk assessment, management and mitigation capacity that responded to major disasters. The paper ends by describing a possible urban climate change adaptation framework, including changes needed at the national, state, city and neighbourhood levels, and linkages to mitigation.

This paper considers the very large differences in adaptive capacity among the world’s urban centres. It then discusses how risk levels may change for a range of climatic drivers of impacts in the near term (2030–2040) and the long term (2080–2100) with a 2°C and a 4°C warming for Dar es Salaam, Durban, London and New York City. The paper is drawn directly from Chapter 8 of Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, the IPCC Working Group II contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report. It includes the complete text of this chapter’s Executive Summary. The paper highlights the limits to what adaptation can do to protect urban areas and their economies and populations without the needed global agreement and action on mitigation; this is the case even for cities with high adaptive capacities. It ends with a discussion of transformative adaptation and where learning on how to achieve this needs to come from.

The campaign for the inclusion of a specifically urban goal within the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was challenging. Numerous divergent interests were involved, while urban areas worldwide are also extremely heterogeneous. It was essential to minimize the number of targets and indicators while still capturing critical urban dimensions relevant to human development. It was also essential to test the targets and indicators. This paper reports the findings of a unique comparative pilot project involving co-production between researchers and local authority officials in five diverse secondary and intermediate cities: Bangalore (Bengaluru),

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Recent evidence shows that climate change is leading to irreversible and existential impacts on vulnerable communities and countries across the globe. Among other effects, this has given rise to public debate and engagement around notions of climate crisis and emergency. The Loss and Damage (L&D) policy debate has emphasized these aspects over the last three decades. Yet, despite institutionalization through an article on L&D by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in the Paris Agreement, the debate has remained vague, particularly with reference to its remit and relationship to adaptation policy and practice. Research has recently made important strides forward in terms of developing a science perspective on L&D. This article reviews insights derived from recent publications by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and others, and presents the implications for science and policy. Emerging evidence on hard and soft adaptation limits in certain systems, sectors and regions holds the potential to further build momentum for climate policy to live up to the Paris ambition of stringent emission reductions and to increase efforts to support the most vulnerable. L&D policy may want to consider actions to extend soft adaptation limits and spur transformational, that is, nonstandard risk management and adaptation, so that limits are not breached. Financial, technical, and legal support would be appropriate for instances where hard limits are transgressed. Research is well positioned to further develop robust evidence on critical and relevant risks at scale in the most vulnerable countries and communities, as well as options to reduce barriers and limits to adaptation.

This publication translates the key scientific findings and policy observations of the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C for officials and policymakers of the world's cities and urban areas. It does not necessarily reflect the views of the IPCC or member governments.

The Paris Agreement put adaptation prominently on the global climate action agenda. Despite a surge in research and praxis-based knowledge on adaptation, a critical policy roadblock is synthesizing and assessing this burgeoning evidence. We develop an approach to assess the multidimensional feasibility of adaptation options in a robust and transparent manner, providing direction for global climate policy and identifying knowledge gaps to further future climate research. The approach, which was tested in the IPCC Special Report on 1.5 °C (SR1.5) to assess 23 adaptation options, is underpinned by a systematic review of recent literature, expert elicitation, and iterative peer review. It responds to the challenge of limited agreement on adaptation indicators, lack of fine-scale adaptation data, and challenges of assessing synergies and trade-offs with mitigation. The findings offer methodological insights into how future assessments such as the IPCC Assessment Report (AR) six and regional, national, and sectoral assessment exercises could assess adaptation feasibility and synthesize the growing body of knowledge on climate change adaptation.