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
Countries are still debating whether to mine the seafloor for minerals, but exploratory efforts have already begun.
As demand for critical minerals surges around the world, countries are debating whether to mine the untapped deep-sea reserves of cobalt, copper and manganese, miles below the surface. But a growing body of research shows that these activities could have profound consequences for ocean ecosystems, and the industries and communities that rely on them.
Climate Change
IEA: Slow transition away from fossil fuels would cost over a million energy sector jobs
A slower shift to clean energy could leave the world with 1.3 million fewer energy sector jobs by 2035 compared with a scenario in which governments fully implement their green policies, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has found.
In its annual World Energy Employment report, the Paris-based watchdog said on Friday that the Current Policies Scenario (CPS), which it reintroduced under pressure from the Trump administration, has “more muted” employment growth than the Stated Policies Scenario.
The CPS sees oil and gas demand continuing to rise until at least 2050 – a scenario that the IEA described as “cautious” and “anchored in enacted laws and measures” and was widely criticised by clean energy experts.
A fast energy transition would spur investment in construction, creating more jobs across the sector. New roles for electricians, building insulators, solar panel and energy-efficient lightbulb installers, and transition mineral miners would more than offset job losses in coal mines, power plants and oil and gas fields, the report found.
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Anabella Rosemberg, Just Transition lead at Climate Action Network International, lamented that the clean energy sector is “being undermined at a time when employment creation is of utmost priority”.
“Climate ambition and decent job creation must go hand in hand – but as the recent conversations at COP30 showed, there is a need for both the right targets and just transition strategies to make it happen,” she added.
A more ambitious Net Zero Emissions scenario, aligned with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C, would see roughly ten million more energy jobs created than under the CPS, report author Daniel Wetzel told Climate Home News at a press conference.
Bottleneck warnings
The IEA warned that governments must act to train workers for these roles or risk facing shortages of electricians, welders, and grid specialists – a gap that could slow the energy transition and drive up wages and energy costs.
IEA head Fatih Birol highlighted a particular shortage of qualified workers in the nuclear industry, warning that the problem could worsen as the sector’s workforce continues to age. “I hear nuclear is making a comeback, but the interest in the nuclear sector for the jobs is rather weak,” he said.
Laura Cozzi, IEA’s Director of Sustainability, Technology and Outlooks, warned of a shortage of skilled workers in electricity grids. “That is one of the key ingredients why we are not seeing grids ramp up as [they] should,” she said. Over 60 governments pledged at COP29 to improve and expand their grids to enable clean electricity to flow to where it is needed.
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Bert De Wel, Global Coordinator for Climate Policy at the International Trade Union Confederation, celebrated that the energy transition is creating jobs but added that they should be good jobs with decent pay, conditions and union rights. Decent work would attract skilled workers, he added.
The report found that wages in the oil and gas industry have generally risen faster over the past year than in the solar – and especially the wind – sectors. It noted that the oil and gas industry has a “historical tendency to offer highly competitive wages to attract and retain top talent”.
At the COP30 climate summit, governments agreed to set up the Belém Action Mechanism to try and make the energy transition fairer to groups such as workers in the energy industry. It will give trade unions a formal role in shaping just transition policies, for what the ITUC says is the first time.
ITUC General Secretary Luc Triangle called it a “decisive win for the union movement and working people across the world, in all sectors but especially those in transition industries.”
The post IEA: Slow transition away from fossil fuels would cost over a million energy sector jobs appeared first on Climate Home News.
IEA: Slow transition away from fossil fuels would cost over a million energy sector jobs
Climate Change
DeBriefed 5 December: Deadly Asia floods; Adaptation finance target examined; Global south IPCC scientists speak out
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Deadly floods in Asia
MOUNTING DEVASTATION: The Associated Press reported that the death toll from catastrophic floods in south-east Asia had reached 1,500, with Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand most affected and hundreds still missing. The newswire said “thousands” more face “severe” food and clean-water shortages. Heavy rains and thunderstorms are expected this weekend, it added, with “saturated soil and swollen rivers leaving communities on edge”. Earlier in the week, Bloomberg said the floods had caused “at least $20bn in losses”.
CLIMATE CHANGE LINKS: A number of outlets have investigated the links between the floods and human-caused climate change. Agence France-Presse explained that climate change was “producing more intense rain events because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture and warmer oceans can turbocharge storms”. Meanwhile, environmental groups told the Associated Press the situation had been exacerbated by “decades of deforestation”, which had “stripped away natural defenses that once absorbed rainfall and stabilised soil”.
‘NEW NORMAL’: The Associated Press quoted Malaysian researcher Dr Jemilah Mahmood saying: “South-east Asia should brace for a likely continuation and potential worsening of extreme weather in 2026 and for many years.” Al Jazeera reported that the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies had called for “stronger legal and policy frameworks to protect people in disasters”. The organisation’s Asia-Pacific director said the floods were a “stark reminder that climate-driven disasters are becoming the new normal”, the outlet said.
Around the world
- REVOKED: The UK and Netherlands withdrew $2.2bn of financial backing from a controversial liquified natural gas (LNG) project in Mozambique, Reuters reported. The Guardian noted that TotalEnergies’ “giant” project stood accused of “fuelling the climate crisis and deadly terror attacks”.
- REVERSED: US president Donald Trump announced plans to “significantly weaken” Biden-era fuel efficiency requirements for cars, the New York Times said.
- RESTRICTED: EU leaders agreed to ban the import of Russian gas from autumn 2027, the Financial Times reported. Meanwhile, Reuters said it is “likely” the European Commission will delay announcing a plan on auto sector climate targets next week, following pressure to “weaken” a 2035 cut-off for combustion engines.
- RETRACTED: An influential Nature study that looked at the economic consequences of climate change has been withdrawn after “criticism from peers”, according to Bloomberg. [The research came second in Carbon Brief’s ranking of the climate papers most covered by the media in 2024.]
- REBUKED: The federal government of Canada faced a backlash over an oil pipeline deal struck last week with the province of Alberta. CBC News noted that First Nations chiefs voted “unanimously” to demand the withdrawal of the deal and Canada’s National Observer quoted author Naomi Klein as saying that the prime minister was “completely trashing Canada’s climate commitments”.
- RESCHEDULED: The Indonesian government has cancelled plans to close a coal plant seven years early, Bloomberg reported. Meanwhile, Bloomberg separately reported that India is mulling an “unprecedented increase” in coal-power capacity that could see plants built “until at least 2047”.
$518 billion a year
The projected coastal flood damages for the Asia-Pacific region by 2100 if current policies continue, according to a Scientific Reports study covered this week by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- More than 100 “climate-sensitive rivers” worldwide are experiencing “large and severe changes in streamflow volume and timing” | Environmental Research Letters
- Africa’s forests have switched from a carbon sink into a source | Scientific Reports
- Increasing urbanisation can “substantially intensify warming”, contributing up to 0.44C of additional temperature rise per year through 2060 | Communications Earth & Environment
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
A new target for developed nations to triple adaptation finance by 2035, agreed at the COP30 climate summit, would not cover more than a third of developing countries’ estimated needs, Carbon Brief analysis showed. The chart above compares a straight line to meeting the adaptation finance target (blue), alongside an estimate of countries’ adaptation needs (grey), which was calculated using figures from the latest UN Environmental Programme adaptation gap report, based on countries’ UN climate plans (called “nationally determined contributions” or NDCs) and national adaptation plans (NAPs).
Spotlight
Inclusivity at the IPCC
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to an IPCC lead author researching ways to improve the experience of global south scientists taking part in producing the UN climate body’s assessments.
Hundreds of climate scientists from around the world met in Paris this week to start work on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) newest set of climate reports.
The IPCC is the UN body responsible for producing the world’s most authoritative climate science reports. Hundreds of scientists from across the globe contribute to each “assessment cycle”, which sees researchers aim to condense all published climate science over several years into three “working group” reports.
The reports inform the decisions of governments – including at UN climate talks – as well as the public understanding of climate change.
The experts gathering in Paris are the most diverse group ever convened by the IPCC.
Earlier this year, Carbon Brief analysis found that – for the first time in an IPCC cycle – citizens of the global south make up 50% of authors of the three working group reports. The IPCC has celebrated this milestone, with IPCC chair Prof Jim Skea touting the seventh assessment report’s (AR7’s) “increased diversity” in August.
But some IPCC scientists have cautioned that the growing involvement of global south scientists does not translate into an inclusive process.
“What happens behind closed doors in these meeting rooms doesn’t necessarily mirror what the diversity numbers say,” Dr Shobha Maharaj, a Trinidadian climate scientist who is a coordinating lead author for working group two (WG2) of AR7, told Carbon Brief.
Global south perspective
Motivated by conversations with colleagues and her own “uncomfortable” experience working on the small-islands chapter of the sixth assessment cycle (AR6) WG2 report, Maharaj – an adjunct professor at the University of Fiji – reached out to dozens of fellow contributors to understand their experience.
The exercise, she said, revealed a “dominance of thinking and opinions from global north scientists, whereas the global south scientists – the scientists who were people of colour – were generally suppressed”.
The perspectives of scientists who took part in the survey and future recommendations for the IPCC are set out in a peer-reviewed essay – co-authored by 20 researchers – slated for publication in the journal PLOS Climate. (Maharaj also presented the findings to the IPCC in September.)
The draft version of the essay notes that global south scientists working on WG2 in AR6 said they confronted a number of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) issues, including “skewed” author selection, “unequal” power dynamics and a “lack of respect and trust”. The researchers also pointed to logistical constraints faced by global south authors, such as visa issues and limited access to journals.
The anonymous quotations from more than 30 scientists included in the essay, Maharaj said, are “clear data points” that she believes can advance a discussion about how to make academia more inclusive.
“The literature is full of the problems that people of colour or global south authors have in academia, but what you don’t find very often is quotations – especially from climate scientists,” she said. “We tend to be quite a conservative bunch.”
Road to ‘improvement’
Among the recommendations set out in the essay are for DEI training, the appointment of a “diversity and inclusion ombudsman” and for updated codes of conduct.
Marharaj said that these “tactical measures” need to occur alongside “transformative approaches” that help “address value systems, dismantle power structures [and] change the rules of participation”.
With drafting of the AR7 reports now underway, Maharaj said she is “hopeful” the new cycle can be an improvement on the last, pointing to a number of “welcome” steps from the IPCC.
This includes holding the first-ever expert meeting on DEI this autumn, new mechanisms where authors can flag concerns and the recruitment of a “science and capacity officer” to support WG2 authors.
The hope, Maharaj explained, is to enhance – not undermine – climate science.
“The idea here was to move forward and to improve the IPCC, rather than attack it,” she said. “Because we all love the science – and we really value what the IPCC brings to the world.”
Watch, read, listen
BROKEN PROMISES: Climate Home News spoke to communities in Nigeria let down by the government’s failure to clean up oil spills by foreign companies.
‘WHEN A ROAD GOES WRONG’: Inside Climate News looked at how a new road from Brazil’s western Amazon to Peru has become a “conduit for rampant deforestation and illegal gold mining”.
SHADOWY COURTS: In the Guardian, George Monbiot lamented the rise of investor-state dispute settlements, which he described as “undemocratic offshore tribunals” that are already having a “chilling effect” on countries’ climate ambitions.
Coming up
- 1-12 December: UN Environment Assembly 7, Nairobi, Kenya
- 7 December: Hong Kong legislative elections
- 11 December: Falkland Islands legislative assembly elections
Pick of the jobs
- Greenpeace International, engagement manager – climate and energy | Salary: Unknown. Location: Various
- The Energy, newsletter editor | Salary: Unknown. Location: Australia (remote)
- University of Groningen, PhD position in motivating people to contribute to societal transitions | Salary: €3,059-€3,881 per month. Location: Groningen, the Netherlands
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 5 December: Deadly Asia floods; Adaptation finance target examined; Global south IPCC scientists speak out appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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