Scientists and stakeholders: Key partners in urban climate change mitigation and adaptation

This volume is focused on addressing an urgent demand on the scientific community to provide new and timely information about how climate change is already affecting and will continue to affect urban areas, and how cities are responding to the challenge. Decision-makers need to know how hot their cities will become, how hydrological regimes may change, and the most effective ways to both adapt to and mitigate climate change, among many other questions.

One way forward is the creation of a process embodied by this report through which urban researchers can, over time, provide updated information and data to city decision-makers. Such an effort provides a similar science-based foundation for cities that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides for countries. The Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN) is an international coalition of researchers linking scholars and policy-makers in cities of all sizes throughout the world, focusing on cutting-edge science, science-policy linkages, and local mitigation and adaptation capacity. The UCCRN brought together approximately 100 authors from more than 50 cities to create this volume. In many ways it serves as both a touchstone of the current state of urban climate change science, and as precursor of even more comprehensive, integrative and collaborative work in the future. We are not alone in undertaking this work, however.