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.

This issue of the Urban-LEDS II Newsletter February 2021 features:

• Successful virtual peer to peer learning for climate action
• City in focus: Recife, Brazil: An example of the fight against climate change
• Urban champion: The Mayor of Envigado, Colombia
• Project synergies: UN-Habitat’s Cities Investment Forum

The Future Saudi Cities Programme is a joint programme developed by the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs in Saudi Arabia and UN-Habitat, implemented in close cooperation with the municipalities of 17 major Saudi cities, the cities have been selected based on their different population sizes, geographic distribution, and a range of criteria based on capacities and economic potential to create a more balanced regional development among the cities of Saudi Arabia. The chosen cities include Riyadh, Makkah, Jeddah, Taif, Madinah, Tabuk, Dammam, Qatif, Al-Ahsa, Abha, Najran, Jazan, Hael, Arar, AlBaha, Buraidah, and Skaka. one of FSCP outcomes is the city profiles.

The city-profile performs as a thinking tool that constitutes together an assessment tool and guidance for the current and future planning of the city, whilst defining a clear strategy for sustainable development. This tool is based on the UN-Habitat’s three-pronged approach considers spatial planning in relation to legal and institutional frameworks, in addition to financial mechanisms. In this way, success criteria for the sustainable implementation of a spatial plan should include flexible but enforceable rules and regulations, in addition to a financing strategy and projections. The City Profile Methodology, that is applied to Tabuk, is contenting the following steps:
1- Evidence based input approach.
2- The City reviews.
3- The City Prosperity Index assessment report.
4- The GIS spatial analysis.

This Toolkit is a companion document for Planning for Climate Change: A strategic values-based approach for urban planners, a resource and planning guide developed for city planners and other professionals to better understand, assess and take action on climate change at the local level.

We live in an urban world: more than 55 per cent of the world population lives in urban areas today and this number will grow to 68 per cent by 2050. Cities are particularly vulnerable to Climate Change as the concentrate large populations and a centres for the national economy and social-economic development. In order to build the climate resilience of the national population and economy, building resilient cities and human settlements is essential. National Adaptation Plans are the most important process to articulate the adaptation needs and priorities of countries, and therefore countries should comprehensively address urban and human settlement issues in National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) at the formulation and implementation stage.

The guide primarily targets decision-makers at the national level working on NAPs, both within and outside UNFCCC focal point ministries, while it also targets a broader set of stakeholders at the national and sub-national levels who are interested in NAPs or who may be involved in their implementation. This guide has been developed to address the support countries require to enhance the coverage of human settlement/urban issues within the broader national effort to formulate and implement NAPs. The supplement also offers advice on how adaptation efforts at the urban level can be scaled up and better integrated into national efforts.

Sustainable Urbanization in the Paris Agreement’ – a comparative review of Nationally Determined Contributions for Urban Content”, a UN-Habitat publication coming on the heels of Habitat III, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and COP22. The adoption of the New Urban Agenda (NUA) on 20 October 2016, and the entry into force of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change two weeks later, on 4 November 2016, are a strong first step toward the immediate implementation of Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development, in urban- and climate change related matters.

In this final version of the publication, UN-Habitat analyzes the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) towards the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, with a special focus on the urban context, in order to understand better the roles of member states in urban climate action. The result is very encouraging: over two-thirds – 113 out of 164 – of the submitted NDCs show clear urban references and content, establishing the relationship between sustainable urbanization and climate action. Through the New Urban Agenda and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, UN-Habitat stands ready to support member states to implement their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).