Cities spearhead climate action

Comparison of Global Downscaled Versus Bottom‐Up Fossil Fuel CO2 Emissions at the Urban Scale in Four U.S. Urban Areas

“…Over 90 megacities, as part of the C40 network, have similarly committed to mitigation actions with demonstrable progress. In the United States, over 400 cities have pledged to meet or exceed the U.S. target under the Paris Accords of the United Nations Climate Change Negotiation (Watts, ; Madhani, ; http://climatemayors.org/). Cities have set specific emission reduction targets including specific timelines and sector‐specific regulatory policies (Trencher et al, ; Ürge‐Vorsatz et al, ).…”

“…This owes in large part to the fact that about 70% of global CO 2 emissions are produced in urban areas which occupy less than 1% of the Earth's land area (Seto et al, ). Motivated by these numerical realities and the recognition that low‐emission development is consistent with a variety of other co‐benefits (e.g., air quality improvement), cities are taking steps to mitigate their CO 2 emissions (Hsu et al, ; Rosenzweig et al, ; Watts, ). For example, 9,120 cities representing over 770 million people (10.5% of global population) have committed to the Global Covenant of Mayors to promote and support action to combat climate change (Global Covenant of Mayors (GCoM), ).…”

Combined Remote Sensing and GIS Techniques for Studying the Large Roman Urban System Expansion during the Last Twenty Years

“…There are numerous large and wide cities all around the world, but in 2011, only about 25 cities reached this population level [6]. Recently, the definition of "mega-cities" has been a little bit enlarged and, at the present time, the 40 most populated cities are considered as "mega-cities", among which Rome, in Italy [7]. Renewed interest in the expansion of the large Roman urban system has developed in recent years, resulting in studies, mainly performed by the Italian National Institute of Statistics [8], the Presidency of the Council of Ministers [9], the Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) [10] and the European Environment Agency (EEA) in order to define potential scenarios of urban growth [11].…”

Enhanced Urban Sprawl Monitoring over the Entire District of Rome through Joint Analysis of ALOS AVNIR-2 and SENTINEL-2A Data

“…Urban areas are par-ticularly vulnerable, not only because of the concentration of population but also due to the interplay that exists between people, infrastructures and natural or man-made risks [2]. In the last decades remarkable urban sprawl took place in Rome [3], especially along the consular roads, which are still the principal infrastructures available for transportation, causing significant environmental impacts, whereby natural surfaces were replaced by buildings, with the consequence of disappearance of vegetated areas, increased soil sealing and atmospheric pollution [4]. The road network constitutes in fact the key geographic object spatially structuring the urban growth of Rome and represents a good target for any aerial and multi-temporal satellite view.…”