Policy Engagements and Blogs

The literature landscape on 1.5 °C climate change and cities

Radhika Khosla

June 8, 2018

FULL ACCESS TO THE JOURNAL ARTICLE, CO-AUTHORED BY RADHIKA KHOSLA
CLIMATE RESEARCH

Cities are key for achieving the 1.5°C warming limit of the Paris Agreement. However, synthesising policy insights from the urban literature is a challenge, due to its rapid growth, breadth of topics and relative lack of assessments so far. Here we introduce methods from computational linguistics to build a systematic overview of research on transport, buildings, waste management and urban form. We find that the epistemic core of the mitigation- focused urban literature is currently centered on urban form and emissions accounting, while extensive research into demand-side options remain overlooked, including congestion and parking polices, active travel, and waste management. In the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Special Report on 1.5°C, and for meeting the target itself, all such city-scale opportunities need to be examined.

The full article can be accessed here.

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