Cities and climate change mitigation: Economic opportunities and governance challenges in Asia

By A. Gouldson, Sarah Colenbrander, Andrew Sudmant, E. Papargyropoulou, Niall Kerr, Faye McAnulla, S. Hall. 2016

118 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cities are central to the fight against climate change, but the IPCC recently noted that many cities — and particularly those in the developing world — lack the institutional, financial and technical capacities needed to switch to low emission development paths. Based on detailed case studies of three Asian cities, this paper finds that the adoption of low emission development strategies (LEDS) at the urban level could be economically attractive. However, it also argues that without a coordinated multi-level, cross-sectoral governance framework these opportunities for low carbon urban development are likely to be left unexploited. As these governance conditions are frequently not in place, we argue that these case study cities, and cities in similar contexts, are likely to miss even the economically attractive low carbon development opportunities and become increasingly locked in to higher cost, higher carbon development paths. Due to their growing size and importance, we conclude that the presence or absence of governance arrangements that enable the adoption of low carbon development strategies in Asian cities will have global implications for climate change.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/98e98bba3672275b3bc95811a926dae01f051b7a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Zhu Liu
2. D. Guan
3. Zhifu Mi
4. Jing Meng
5. Kuishuang Feng
6. Yuli Shan
7. Klaus Hubacek
8. G. P. Peters

In Environmental Engineering

1. Zhu Liu
2. D. Guan
3. Zhifu Mi
4. Jing Meng
5. Yuli Shan
6. Kuishuang Feng
7. Klaus Hubacek
8. G. P. Peters

Citations in the corpus

• Cities: The core of climate change mitigation (2019, background): “Cities are home to more than half of the world population and are responsible for three quarters of global energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (Gouldson et al., 2016).”