Climate Change and Cities

Climate Change and Cities bridges science-to-action for climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts in cities around the world.

Cynthia Rosenzweig is a Senior Research Scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, where she heads the Climate Impacts Group. She is Co-Chair of the New York City Panel on Climate Change, a body of experts convened by the mayor to advise the city on adaptation for its critical infrastructure. She co-led the Metropolitan East Coast Regional Assessment of the US National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, sponsored by the US Global Change Research Program. Rosenzweig was a Coordinating Lead Author of Working Group II for the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She is Co-Director of the Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN) and Co-Editor of the First UCCRN Assessment Report on Climate Change and Cities (ARC3), the first ever global, interdisciplinary, cross-regional, science-based assessment to address climate risks, adaptation, mitigation, and policy mechanisms relevant to cities. She is the founder of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP), a major international collaborative effort to assess the state of global agricultural modeling, understand climate impacts on the agricultural sector, and enhance adaptation capacity, as it pertains to food security, in developing and developed countries. She was named as one of 'Nature's 10: Ten People Who Mattered in 2012' by the journal Nature. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she joins impact models with climate models to project future outcomes of both land-based and urban systems under altered climate conditions. She is a Professor at Barnard College, New York and a Senior Research Scientist at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, New York.

William D. Solecki is a Professor in the Department of Geography, Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY). He has led or co-led numerous projects on the process of urban environmental change and transformation. As Director of the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities, he has worked extensively on connecting cutting-edge urban environmental science to everyday practice and action in cities. He most recently served as Co-Chair of the New York City Panel on Climate Change, as Co-Principal Investigator of the Integrated Assessment for Effective Climate Change Adaptation Strategies in New York State (ClimAID), and as Co-Leader of the Metropolitan East Coast Assessment of the US National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change. He is a Lead Author of the IPCC Working Group II Fifth Assessment Report. He is also a member of International Geographical Union (IGU) Megacity Study Group and a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the Urbanization and Global Environmental Change core project of the International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP).

Patricia Romero-Lankao is Deputy Director of the Institute for the Study of Society and Environment, part of the Mexico branch of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Her research examines the interactions of urban development with global climate change, including carbon and water cycles, the drivers of energy use in cities, societal factors that underpin the vulnerability of cities to heat waves and air pollution, and how urban settings can be made more resilient to these and other stresses. She coordinated peer review for the 2009 Panel report Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production: Priority Products and Materials. Romero-Lankao also served on the scientific committee of the Global Carbon Project and was lead author of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.

Shagun Mehrotra is Managing Director of Climate and Cities, an international policy advisor facility jointly housed at Columbia University, New York and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. With an interdisciplinary team of scientists and policy makers around the world, Shagun is crafting a global institutional structure for a programmatic approach to incorporate climate risk into city development by leveraging existing and planned investments. He has developed a comprehensive framework for city climate risk assessment that combines hazards, vulnerabilities, and agency. As Faculty Fellow at Columbia University, his research and policy advice focus on infrastructure economics and finance, development economics, and poverty reduction in slums. Previously, he was on the staff of the World Bank, leading infrastructure reform of state-owned utilities in Africa. Over the last decade, Shagun's advice has been sought by national and local governments in East Africa, South-East Asia, China, and India, as well as the United Nations' Human Development Report, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Columbia Earth Institute. The President of India recently wrote a foreword for his co-authored book Bankruptcy to Billions: How the Indian Railways Transformed (2011).

Shobhakar Dhakal is an Associate Professor in the Energy Field of Study at the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand. His areas of expertise are in urbanization, cities and climate change, and energy policies and modeling. He has been a visiting researcher at the National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan since 2012. Dhakal is one of the Coordinating Lead Authors of Working Group III for the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC. He serves as a member of the scientific steering committee of the Global Carbon Project, the premier scientific program under Future Earth. He was a guest research scholar at International Institute for Applied System Analysis in Austria from 2010 to 2013. Dhakal has served as a lead author for the Global Energy Assessment, principal scientific reviewer for UNEP's Global Environmental Outlook-5, member of the Consensus Panel on Low Carbon Cities of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa, member of the Cities Energy Modeling Group of the International Energy Agency, and an international expert to the Taskforce on Urban Development and Energy Efficiency of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, among others. Dhakal is also one of the editors-in-chief of the journal Carbon Management.