doi.org
What Do Cities Count? A Global Analysis of Indicators in Urban Climate Action Planning | Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy
Background: This research examines 103 climate action plans (CAPs) from 88 C40 cities to explore (a) how measurable indicators are prioritized across thematic dimensions and (b) how city-level context explains variance across planning priorities. Methods: Using UN-Habitat’s City Prosperity Index (CPI) as a guiding framework, we categorize indicators across six dimensions: environmental sustainability, productivity, infrastructure development, quality of life, urban governance, and equity. We use automated text extraction methods and qualitative coding to create a novel data set of indicators from CAPs. Regression analyses assess how city-level variables, including population size, climate risk, and development indices, relate to emphasis on different CPI dimensions. Results: Global cities measure and track a diverse range of metrics across CPI dimensions. Environmental sustainability and infrastructure development are the most commonly tracked indicators, with equity and social inclusion less frequently recorded across cities globally. When measured, equity indicators are most often paired with quality of life and governance outcomes, but these results are heterogeneous across continents. Cities with higher levels of climate risk are more likely to track environmental and infrastructure indicators, and lower quality of life rankings are related to greater CAP emphasis on equity. Conclusion: Our findings indicate that social and economic dimensions of climate action planning, including equity, productivity, quality of life, and governance, remain unevenly integrated across cities globally. Considering heterogeneity in how CAPs measure progress, we suggest that efforts to achieve climate justice require not only scaling up technical solutions but also embedding distributive and procedural equity throughout climate planning approaches.
