Research on climate change in urban areas is skewed towards large, well-established cities in the global north, according to analysis of more than 50,000 studies.
The research, published in Nature Cities, uses keyword searching and machine-learning methods to produce a database of studies on climate change and cities published over 1990-2022.
The authors find that small, fast-growing cities – especially in Africa and Asia – are underrepresented in their database.
“While cities like London, New York and Berlin are extensively studied, fast-growing cities such as Goma (Democratic Republic of the Congo), Surat (India) and Huế (Vietnam) are barely visible in the literature,” one study author tells Carbon Brief.
Inhabitants of these cities have collectively contributed very little to global greenhouse gas emissions, but face the greatest impacts from the warming planet, the authors say.
The paper finds that literature on climate change and cities is growing “exponentially”, with 84% of studies on this topic published over 2012-22.
The new analysis is published as scientists from around the world start work on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on climate change and cities, which is due for publication in March 2027.
The study finds that, in its most recent set of headline reports, the IPCC captured “only” 5% of the total available literature on climate change and cities.
One study author tells Carbon Brief that the study is a “call to action” for the IPCC and broader research community “to synthesise more, to look beyond familiar places and to take seriously the diversity of urban realities that will define the future of climate mitigation and adaptation”.
Climate change and cities
More than half of the world’s population live in cities. These densely populated areas are responsible for the majority of global emissions and are also hotspots for climate extremes, including heatwaves and flooding.
Research about climate change and cities is a fast-growing field that encompasses, among other topics, the impacts of climate change on city infrastructure, adaptation measures that city-dwellers are taking and technological measures to limit emissions from cities.
The IPCC’s upcoming assessment report will feature its biggest overview of research on cities to date, as the organisation has commissioned a special report on climate change and cities as part of its upcoming assessment cycle. The report’s outline has already been agreed and the final document is scheduled for publication in March 2027.
However, the new study argues that, without a dedicated effort to “pre-aggregate the underlying literature by the entire research community”, the IPCC “may struggle to deliver a balanced and comprehensive review”.
The new analysis is the “first global stocktake of literature” on climate change and cities, according to a press release from the University of Sussex. The research was produced in-part to help advise the authors of the IPCC report about the current landscape of literature on climate change and cities, the study authors tell Carbon Brief.
Author Dr Tim Repke is a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He tells Carbon Brief that he hopes that the new study “can serve as a starting point of searchable, clean data” to help the authors of the upcoming IPCC special report to “do their work more efficiently”.
A growing field
The amount of literature on climate change in cities is “much larger than previously estimated”, the paper says.
Moreover, the analysis points to “rapid, exponential growth” in literature on climate change and cities over the past three decades.
The graph below shows the number of studies about climate change and cities published each year over 1990-2022 (dark blue) and the subset of studies that focus on specific city case studies (light blue).
The plot also shows how many studies were published during the writing periods of each IPCC assessment report. For example, 37,539 studies on climate change and cities were published in time to feature in the IPCC’s sixth assessment cycle (AR6).
The authors find that 84% of studies in their database were published over 2012-22.
Literature on climate change and cities is currently growing 4.5 times faster than literature on climate change alone, they add.
Dr Simon Montfort is a postdoctoral researcher at Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and lead author of the study. He tells Carbon Brief that the rapid growth in literature on climate change and cities is “not really surprising” because population growth in cities means that these areas are “becoming more and more important”.
The data can be explored further in their interactive online tool.
Uneven focus
There is a well-established skew in climate change literature towards wealthy nations in the global north. The new study finds that this skew is highly evident in literature on climate change and cities.
The map below shows the locations of the 20,000 “case study” papers. Darker colours indicate more highly researched areas. The map shows cities that were researched in one study (pink), between one and five studies (orange) and in more than five studies (red). The graph in the bottom left shows this information broken down by continent.
The authors identify more than 4,000 studies in Europe and 3,000 in North America. According to the authors, half of cities in these continents are covered by more than one study.
However, the map reveals a lack of research focused on cities in central and South America, Africa, the Middle East and south and south-east Asia.
The authors identify more than 8,900 studies focused on cities in Asia. One-third of these focus on Chinese cities, they find. The authors identify more than 1,500 studies on Beijing alone, most of which focus on mitigation, rather than impacts or adaptation.
Meanwhile, they find that 92% of cities in Africa are researched in no more than one study. Nigeria is the most highly studied country on the continent, with almost 400 studies – half of which focus on Lagos.
The authors identify a bias in their research database towards large cities with high emissions. Meanwhile, they find that small, fast-growing, non-coastal cities are underrepresented in the literature.
Prof Felix Creuztig is the head of the working group on cities at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He is an author on the study and on the upcoming IPCC special report.
He tells Carbon Brief:
“While cities like London, New York and Berlin are extensively studied, fast-growing cities such as Goma, Surat and Huế are barely visible in the literature. These smaller and rapidly urbanising cities in Africa and Asia are precisely where climate risks and emissions are increasing fastest, yet they are strikingly underrepresented.”
50,000 studies
To identify all existing literature on climate change and cities, the authors conducted their search using the open-access research database OpenAlex.
They first used a long list of keywords to search the abstracts of every paper on OpenAlex for research focused on cities and climate change. Keywords for literature on cities included “urban” and “built-up”, while key words for climate change ranged from “changing climate” to “carbon taxes”.
They then checked these papers using a “machine learning classifier”, which filtered out any research that was unsuitable.
The authors used a machine-learning approach to scan the abstracts of studies in their database, to determine which topics are most frequently covered.
More than half of the papers in the database were focused on mitigation, the authors found. The impacts of climate change on cities was covered in around 15,000 papers, and the rest covered adaptation and “cross-cutting” topics.
Lead author Montfort tells Carbon Brief that the database of 50,000 articles is “quite a precise sample, meaning that it includes few irrelevant articles”.
However, he adds that there may be “many relevant articles missing from our sample”. For example, the authors find that their database does not completely capture literature from the “physical sciences”, such as smart energy grids or radiative cooling methods.
Language is another notable bias, as the database only includes research published in English.
Dr Doan Quang Van is a researcher at Japan’s University of Tsukuba and a lead author on the upcoming special report. He praises the study, but notes that the English-only database likely leads to an “underappreciation of non-English regions”.
He also notes that Indigenous knowledge, which is “not necessarily contained in ‘official documents’ like papers or reports” is not included in the database.
IPCC recommendations
The authors compare the tens of thousands of studies cited by the IPCC in its most recent assessment cycle – AR6 – to their own database of literature on cities and climate change. They estimate that the IPCC cited almost 2,500 studies from the database in AR6, representing around 5% of the total.
They find that the IPCC’s choices about which studies to include further deepens the skew towards “large and mega cities” in the global north that is already evident in the literature.
Lead author Montfort tells Carbon Brief that the case studies are a “rich-evidence base” of “nuanced, case-specific knowledge”.
He says that it is important to expand the evidence base to less well-studied cities, but acknowledges it is “highly infeasible to conduct a study for every single city”. As such, he suggests that researchers should “look for ways to generalise findings from the more than 20,000 city-specific case studies already available”. He adds:
“If cities can learn from each other’s experiences, the existing evidence could go much further in informing city practitioners.”
To do this, the authors suggest that scientists should develop a data-driven method of grouping cities based on size, location and language, to enable “cross-city transfer learning from successful climate solutions”.
Dr Tamara Janes is a member of the climate information for international development team at the UK Met Office and an author on the upcoming IPCC special report. She was not involved in the new research.
She tells Carbon Brief that the study is “useful and timely”, adding that it “will undoubtedly help the ongoing special report by providing a solid foundational understanding for the current state of urban research worldwide”.
Janes adds that “this type of study is not only useful for researchers to design their research questions, but also for donor agencies as gaps in research can then be prioritised through flexible funding initiatives”.
Study author Crueztig says:
“For the IPCC and the broader research community, this is a call to action: to synthesise more, to look beyond familiar places and to take seriously the diversity of urban realities that will define the future of climate mitigation and adaptation.”
IPCC working group two co-chair, Dr Winston Chow, tells Carbon Brief that the “voluminous literature on climate change today presents challenges in its assessment”. He adds:
“Our experts are aware of these challenges towards developing reliable findings in informing our assessments and the IPCC is formally discussing this issue in a forthcoming expert workshop on methods of assessment.”
The authors add that they hope their interactive map, which is available online, will update automatically in the future to provide a “searchable, interactive, living database” of literature on climate change and cities.
The post Fast-growing, global-south cities are ‘strikingly underrepresented’ in climate research appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Fast-growing, global-south cities are ‘strikingly underrepresented’ in climate research
Colombia wants countries to discuss options for a global agreement to ensure that the extraction, processing and recycling of minerals – including those needed for the clean energy transition – don’t harm the environment and human wellbeing.
The mineral-rich nation is proposing to create an expert group to “identify options for international instruments, including global and legally-binding instruments, for coordinated global action on the environmentally sound management of minerals and metals through [their] full lifecyle”.
Colombia hopes this will eventually lead to an agreement on the need for an international treaty to define mandatory rules and standards that would make mineral value chains more transparent and accountable.
The proposal was set out in a draft resolution submitted to the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA) earlier this week and seen by Climate Home News. UNEA, which is constituted of all UN member states, is the world’s top decision-making body for matters relating to the environment. The assembly’s seventh session will meet in Kenya in December to vote on countries’ proposals.
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Soaring demand for the minerals used to manufacture clean energy technologies and electric vehicles, as well as in the digital, construction and defence industries have led to growing environmental destruction, human rights violations and social conflict.
Colombia argues there is an “urgent need” to strengthen global cooperation and governance to reduce the risks to people and the planet.
Options for a global minerals agreement
The proposal is among a flurry of initiatives to strength global mineral governance at a time when booming demand is putting pressure on new mining projects.
Colombia, which produces emeralds, gold, platinum and silver for exports, first proposed the idea for a binding international agreement on minerals traceability and accountability on the sidelines of the UN biodiversity talks it hosted in October 2024.
Since then, the South American nation has been quietly trying to drum up support for the idea, especially among African and European nations.
Its draft resolution to UNEA7 contains very few details, leaving it open for countries to discuss what kind of global instrument would be best suited to make mineral supply chains more transparent and sustainable.
Does the world need a global treaty on energy transition minerals?
Colombia says it wants the expert group to build on other UN initiatives, including a UN Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals, which set out seven principles to ensure the mining, processing and recycling of energy transition minerals are done responsibly and benefit everyone.
The group would include technical experts and representatives from international and regional conventions, major country groupings as well as relevant stakeholders.
It would examine the feasibility and effectiveness of different options for a global agreement, consider their costs and identify measures to support countries to implement what is agreed.
The resolution also calls for one or two meetings for member states to discuss the idea before the UNEA8 session planned in late 2027, when countries would decide on a way forward.
No time to lose for treaty negotiations
Colombia’s efforts to advance global talks on mineral supply chains have been welcomed by resource experts and campaigners. But not everyone agrees on the best strategy to move the discussion forward at a time when multilateralism is coming under attack.
Johanna Sydow, a resource policy expert who heads the international environmental policy division of the Heinrich-Böll Foundation, said she had hoped that the resolution would explicitly call for negotiations to begin on an international minerals treaty.
“Treaty negotiations take a long time. If you don’t even start with it now, it will take even longer. I don’t see how in two or three years it will be easier to come to an agreement,” she told Climate Home.
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Despite the geopolitical challenges, “we need joint rules to prevent a huge race to the bottom for [mineral] standards”. That could start with a group of countries coming together and starting to enforce joint standards for mining, processing and recycling minerals, she said.
But any meaningful global agreement on mineral supply chains would require backing from China, the world’s largest processor of minerals, which dominates most of the supply chains. And with Colombia heading for an election in May, it will need all the support it can get to move its proposal forward.
‘Voluntary initiative won’t cut it’
Juliana Peña Niño, Colombia country manager at the Natural Resource Governance Institute, is more optimistic. “Colombia’s leadership towards fairer mineral value chains is a welcome step,” she told Climate Home News.
“At UNEA7, we need an ambitious debate that gives the proposed expert group a clear mandate to advance concrete next steps — not delay decisions — and that puts the voices of those most affected at the centre. One thing is clear: the path forward must ultimately deliver a binding instrument, as yet another voluntary initiative simply won’t cut it,” she said.
More than 50 civil society groups spanning Latin America, Africa and Europe previously described Colombia’s work on the issue as “a chance to build a new global paradigm rooted in environmental integrity, human rights, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, justice and equity”.
“As the energy transition and digitalisation drive demand for minerals, we cannot afford to repeat old extractive models built on asymmetry – we must redefine them,” they wrote in a statement.
Main image: The UN Environment Assembly is hosted in Nairobi, Kenya. (Natalia Mroz/ UN Environment)
The post Colombia proposes expert group to advance talks on minerals agreement appeared first on Climate Home News.
Colombia proposes expert group to advance talks on minerals agreement
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Climate Change
DeBriefed 3 October 2025: UK political gap on climate widens; Fossil-fuelled Typhoon Ragasa; ‘Overshoot’ unknowns
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Shattered climate consensus
FRACKING BAN: UK energy secretary Ed Miliband has announced that the government will bring forward its plans to permanently ban fracking, in a move designed to counter a promise from the hard-right Reform party to restart efforts to introduce the practice, the Guardian said. In the same speech, Miliband said Reform’s plans to scrap clean-energy projects would “betray” young people and future generations, the Press Association reported.
ACT AXE?: Meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservatives, pledged to scrap the 2008 Climate Change Act if elected, Bloomberg reported. It noted that the legislation was passed with cross-party support and strengthened by the Conservatives.
‘INSANE’: Badenoch faced a backlash from senior Tory figures, including ex-prime minister Theresa May, who called her pledge a “catastrophic mistake”, said the Financial Times. The newspaper added that the Conservatives were “trailing third in opinion polls”. A wide range of climate scientists also condemned the idea, describing it as “insane”, an “insult” and a “serious regression”.
Around the world
- CLIMATE CRACKDOWN: The US Department of Energy has told employees in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy to avoid using the term “climate change”, according to the Guardian.
- FOREST DELAY: Plans for Brazil’s COP30 flagship initiative, the tropical forests forever fund, are “suffer[ing] delays” as officials remain split on key details, Bloomberg said.
- COP MAY BE ‘SPLIT’: Australia could “split” the hosting of the COP31 climate summit in 2026 under a potential compromise with Turkey, reported the Guardian.
- DIVINE INTERVENTION: Pope Leo XIV has criticised those who minimise the “increasingly evident” impact of global warming in his first major climate speech, BBC News reported.
€44.5 billion
The cost of extreme weather and climate change in the EU in the last four years – two-and-a-half times higher than in the decade to 2019, according to a European Environment Agency report covered by the Financial Times.
Latest climate research
- Fossil-fuelled climate change caused around 36% of Typhoon Ragasa’s direct damage to homes and properties in southern China, according to a rapid impact attribution study | Imperial Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment
- Some 86% of the global population are concerned about climate change, according to a survey of 280,000 people in 142 countries and regions | Climate Policy
- A global shift towards a “planetary health diet” could slash emissions and save tens of thousands of lives each day | EAT-Lancet Commission 2025 report
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Clean energy has met 100% of Great Britain’s electricity demand for a record 87 hours this year so far, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. This is up from just 2.5 hours in 2021 and 64.5 hours in all of 2024. The longest stretch of time where 100% of electricity demand was met by clean energy stands at 15 hours, from midnight on 25 May 2025 through to 3pm on 26 May, according to the analysis.
Spotlight
‘Overshoot’ unknowns
As the chances of limiting global warming to 1.5C dwindle, there is increasing focus on the prospects for “overshooting” the Paris Agreement target and then bringing temperatures back down by removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
At the first-ever Overshoot Conference in Laxenburg, Austria, Carbon Brief asks experts about the key unknowns around warming “overshoot”.
Sir Prof Jim Skea
Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and emeritus professor at Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy
So there are huge knowledge gaps around overshoot and carbon dioxide removal (CDR). As it’s very clear from the themes of this conference, we don’t altogether understand how the Earth would react in taking CO2 out of the atmosphere.
We don’t understand the nature of the irreversibilities and we don’t understand the effectiveness of CDR techniques, which might themselves be influenced by the level of global warming, plus all the equity and sustainability issues surrounding using CDR techniques.
Prof Kristie Ebi
Professor at the University of Washington’s Center for Health and the Global Environment
There are all kinds of questions about adaptation and how to approach effective adaptation. At the moment, adaptation is primarily assuming a continual increase in global mean surface temperature. If there is going to be a peak – and of course, we don’t know what that peak is – then how do you start planning? Do you change your planning?
There are places, for instance when thinking about hard infrastructure, [where overshoot] may result in a change in your plan – because as you come down the backside, maybe the need would be less. For example, when building a bridge taller. And when implementing early warning systems, how do you take into account that there will be a peak and ultimately a decline? There is almost no work in that. I would say that’s one of the critical unknowns.
Dr James Fletcher
Former minister for public service, sustainable development, energy, science and technology for Saint Lucia and negotiator at COP21 in Paris.
The key unknown is where we’re going to land. At what point will we peak [temperatures] before we start going down and how long will we stay in that overshoot period? That is a scary thing. Yes, there will be overshoot, but at what point will that overshoot peak? Are we peaking at 1.6C, 1.7C, 2.1C?
All of these are scary scenarios for small island developing states – anything above 1.5C is scary. Every fraction of a degree matters to us. Where we peak is very important and how long we stay in this overshoot period is equally important. That’s when you start getting into very serious, irreversible impacts and tipping points.
Prof Oliver Geden
Senior fellow and head of the climate policy and politics research cluster at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and vice-chair of IPCC Working Group III
[A key unknown] is whether countries are really willing to commit to net-negative trajectories. We are assuming, in science, global pathways going net-negative, with hardly any country saying they want to go there. So maybe it is just an academic thought experiment. So we don’t know yet if [overshoot] is even relevant. It is relevant in the sense that if we do, [the] 1.5C [target] stays on the table. But I think the next phase needs to be that countries – or the UNFCCC as a whole – needs to decide what they want to do.
Prof Lavanya Rajamani
Professor of international environmental law at the University of Oxford
I think there are several scientific unknowns, but I would like to focus on the governance unknowns with respect to overshoot. To me, a key governance unknown is the extent to which our current legal and regulatory architecture – across levels of governance, so domestic, regional and international – will actually be responsive to the needs of an overshoot world and the consequences of actually not having regulatory and governance architectures in place to address overshoot.
Watch, read, listen
FUTURE GAZING: The Financial Times examined a “future where China wins the green race”.
‘JUNK CREDITS’: Climate Home News reported on a “forest carbon megaproject” in Zimbabwe that has allegedly “generated millions of junk credits”.
‘SINK OR SWIM’: An extract from a new book on how the world needs to adapt to climate change, by Dr Susannah Fisher, featured in Backchannel.
Coming up
- 7 October: International Energy Agency (IEA) renewables 2025 report launch
- 8-10 October: World summit of Indigenous peoples and nature, Abu Dhabi, UAE
- 9-15 October: International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) 2025 congress, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Pick of the jobs
- UK government foreign, commonwealth and development office, senior climate policy adviser | Salary: CA$93,207. Location: Calgary, Canada
- Wellcome Trust, senior research manager, climate and health | Salary: £64,800. Location: London
- Bloomberg, product manager – climate, nature and sustainability regulations | Salary: Unknown. Location: London
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 3 October 2025: UK political gap on climate widens; Fossil-fuelled Typhoon Ragasa; ‘Overshoot’ unknowns appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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Colombia proposes expert group to advance talks on minerals agreement
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