The Urban Climate Challenge ─ Rethinking the Role of Cities in the Global Climate Regime

Drawing upon a variety of empirical and theoretical perspectives, The Urban Climate Challenge provides a hands-on perspective about the political and technical challenges now facing cities and transnational urban networks in the global climate regime. Bringing together experts working in the fields of global environmental governance, urban sustainability and climate change, this volume explores the ways in which cities, transnational urban networks and global policy institutions are repositioning themselves in relation to this changing global policy environment.

Focusing on both Northern and Southern experience across the globe, three questions that have strong bearing on the ways in which we understand and assess the changing relationship between cities and global climate system are examined.

• How are cities repositioning themselves in relation to the global climate regime?
• How are cities being repositioned – conceptually and epistemologically?
• What are the prospects for crafting policies that can reduce the urban carbon footprint while at the same time building resilience to future climate change?

The Urban Climate Challenge will be of interest to scholars of urban climate policy, global environmental governance and climate change. It will be of interest to readers more generally interested in the ways in which cities are now addressing the inter-related challenges of sustainable urban growth and global climate change.

Craig Johnson is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Development Studies at the University of Guelph in Canada. His research focuses on questions of land and resource governance in the context of urbanization, globalization and climate change.

Noah Toly is Director of Urban Studies and Associate Professor of Politics & International Relations at Wheaton College in the United States (IL). His research and teaching interests are at the intersections of urban and global environmental governance, with particular interests in the participation of cities as sites and municipalities as actors in climate governance regimes.

Heike Schroeder is a senior lecturer in climate change and international development at the School of International Development, University of East Anglia. Her areas of work include global environmental politics, urban climate governance, the role of non-state actors in international cooperation on climate change and forest governance.