Cities and Climate Change- PLOS Climate

As the IPCC develops plans for a Special Report on Cities and Climate Change in its AR7 reporting cycle, there is a clear and urgent need for a strong and wide-ranging evidence base for decision-makers to take informed actions in policy and practice. Here we bring together a set of Research Articles and Opinions published in PLOS Climate that address climate change impacts, adaptation and mitigation in urban environments.

Perception of heat stress in cities and measures for health protection
Matzarakis and Nouri discuss some of the key research priorities for supporting policies and practices to mitigate heat stress in cities.

Leaders or laggards in climate action? Assessing GHG trends and mitigation targets of global megacities
Sethi and Creutzig analyse the contributions of world’s biggest cities to greenhouse gas emissions and opportunities to mitigate their footprint.

Household energy use response to extreme heat with a biophysical model of temperature regulation: An Arizona case study
Hughes and colleagues expand modelling approaches for household energy use in response to temperature extremes.

Modeling the intra-urban nocturnal summertime air temperature fields at a daily basis in a city with complex topography
Burger and colleagues develop a new low-resource system for modelling night-time temperatures in cities.

Deciphering small business community disaster support using machine learning
Pierel and colleagues use machine learning to predict urban small businesses’ active involvement in community resilience to climate-related disasters.

Trends in tropical nights and their effects on mortality in Switzerland across 50 years
Rippstein and colleagues find that ‘tropical nights’ are occurring more frequently in Swiss cities, with important implications for public health.