Seizing the Urban Opportunity: A 3-step guide for strengthening Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) 3.0

This guide offers a practical framework to integrate urban priorities into national climate plans (NDCs), ensuring they are more inclusive, grounded, and ready to implement where climate action happens – in cities.

Cities are at the centre of the climate crisis, yet they remain underrepresented in national climate plans. While urban area cities consume 78 per cent of the world's energy and produce more than 60 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, only 27 per cent of NDCs include strong urban content. Financing is another major gap: urban requests for finance, technology, and capacity-building are outnumbered by national ones up to 40 to 1. Furthermore, only 40 per cent of NDCs include both urban mitigation and adaptation strategies.

This guide provides policymakers, national climate planners, and other stakeholders with a clear path forward. It offers a structured 3-step approach to assess current NDCs, prepare, and co-design stronger NDCs which reflect the challenges and opportunities of cities.

Co-developed by UN-Habitat and SDU Resilience, with support from over 15 partners organizations, including C40 Cities, ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, the Global Covenant of Mayors (GCoM) and UNDP Climate Promise, this guide builds on Urban Content of NDCs, which became UN-Habitat’s most downloaded publication of 2024 (behind the World Cities Report on Cities and Climate Action), and serves as a timely tool to support governments and stakeholders in designing inclusive, locally grounded, and implementation-ready climate plans.