Abolitionist and critical climate justice approaches provide a theoretical framework beyond environmental justice for identifying inequities driving or stemming from climate change, specifically those related to recognitional injustice. Leveraging these insights, we provide an empirical assessment of how U.S. cities are considering mobilizing recognitional justice while implementing climate adaptation efforts on the ground. Doing so illustrates the ways in which critical climate justice theories have and have not yet been put into practice to ameliorate inequality. To do this, we analyze adaptation plans across 25 U.S. cities using a robust content analytical approach. Despite increasing scholarly attention on abolitionist climate justice, we find that, in practice, cities are only beginning to center their plans on recognizing historical inequalities, with attention paid to racism and redlining, a discriminatory practice of restricting who can live where based on race or ethnicity, in particular. We see fewer examples of how cities are considering or addressing systemic drivers of climate vulnerability and socio-economic inequality. Our focus on recognitional dimensions complements and builds on existing research on procedural and distributive equity in urban climate action, and supports ways to advance and implement broader, more comprehensive climate justice goals in cities across the U.S.

Cities are increasingly pursuing sustainability efforts to create inclusive, safe, and climate resilient places. However, there is evidence that emerging climate adaptation actions in cities—whether intentionally or unintentionally—are contributing to widening socioeconomic inequalities. Scholars of climate urbanism have responded to this challenge by calling for efforts to tackle underlying injustices. Leveraging such insights, we provide an empirical assessment of 25 U.S. cities’ plans to address distributional inequities through climate adaptation. Despite increasing scholarly attention, we find that, in practice, cities have relatively limited, but growing, engagements with distributive equity in their adaptation efforts. We find evidence that distributive strategies tend to coalesce across five key sectors: economic empowerment, food and health, housing and land use, urban greening, and water. We find that a focus on distributive climate justice—as complementary to existing research on procedural equity—is needed to advance broader, more comprehensive climate justice goals in cities.

Cities and local governments are important actors in the global governance of climate change; however, the specific governance principles and arrangements that enable urban climate plans and policies to realize commitments to social equity and justice remain largely unexplored. This article uses the City of Barcelona, Spain, as a critical case study of emerging "intersectional climate justice" practice, where plans to build resilience to climate change are pursued in conjunction with efforts to tackle structural inequalities in accessing the built environment, health services, energy, housing, and transportation experienced by frontline communities. The study illustrates how Barcelona and its community partners do this through four different categories of governance and decision-making tactics, which include: (1) experimenting with disruptive planning strategies; (2) working transversally across agencies and actors to institutionalize climate justice over time; (3) putting care at the center of urban planning; and (4) mobilizing place-based approaches to tackle intersecting vulnerabilities of frontline residents. These tactics seek to redistribute the benefits of climate-resilient infrastructures more fairly and to enhance participatory processes more meaningfully. Finally, we assess the limitations and challenges of mobilizing these tactics in everyday urban politics. Barcelona's experience contributes to research on climate governance by challenging the notion of distinct waves of governance and revealing concurrent dimensions of climate urbanism that coexist spatially and temporally. Our research also illustrates lessons for fairer climate governance in the city, where different tactics are mobilized to address structural and intersecting socioeconomic vulnerabilities that exacerbate the experience of climate change of frontline residents.

Although there is broad consensus that more inclusive approaches are needed in climate adaptation planning, it is unclear how cities should redesign rules, institutions, and decision-making processes to produce more equitable forms of participation and engagement. This paper evaluates different planning procedures and institutional arrangements across twenty-five U.S. cities. Although arrangements are context-specific, institutional designs fall into three categories: consultative partnerships, strategic collaborations, and expansive co-governance arrangements. Each institutional design leads to different kinds of inclusion outcomes. Our results empiricize how cities can pursue more inclusive climate adaptation planning and highlight opportunities to advance and implement broader procedural equity goals.

Climate shelters are critical urban infrastructures to support adaptation to extreme weather. They offer spaces - e.g., parks, libraries, and civic centers - where residents can take refuge during episodes of extreme temperatures. With over 200 public spaces designated as "Climate Shelters", Barcelona (Spain) serves as an emblematic example of whether these emerging spaces are meeting the needs, expectations, and everyday experiences of the most vulnerable residents. By applying an intersectional climate justice perspective and mixed-method approaches rooted in a survey of a particularly climate-exposed working-class neighborhood (La Prosperitat), we found that the intersecting vulnerabilities of marginalized populations remain poorly addressed, largely due to differences in access to coping mechanisms that overlap with intersecting social positions, exacerbating vulnerability to climate risks. We also found that housing inadequacy and energy poverty experienced by lowincome residents and those originally from Global South countries made them the most affected and least able to cope with extreme temperatures. Women were also more affected by climate impacts and more concerned about current and future risks. We argue that unequal lived experiences of thermal (dis)comforts inform heat and cold inequalities, which, in turn, are attributed to intersecting social positions and structural vulnerabilities. These uneven lived experiences shape - and are reshaped by - limited adaptive capacity, culturally inappropriate approaches, and insufficiently inclusive public spaces, thus complicating an equity-driven provision of refuge infrastructures. Results call for developing refuge infrastructures that address the intersecting social and climate needs of residents who need them the most.

Cities increasingly recognize the importance of furthering social equity in their climate adaptation planning. Such efforts are often in response to grassroots mobilizations, yet it is not clear to what extent they translate into urban coalitions, policy designs, and implementation efforts within city governments. In this paper, we respond to this knowledge gap by assessing how equity-thinking is translated into cities’ adaptation decision-making and governance arrangements, especially in ways that can lead to more inclusive and just climate adaptation outcomes for historically marginalized communities. We analyze adaptation plans for the 25 largest US cities using deductive and inductive coding strategies to uncover the ideas, rhetoric, and processes that guide equitable plans. We then map these outcomes of equity-thinking across procedural, distributive, and recognitional categories. Our analysis lends support to the operation of two social constructivist mechanisms of equity-thinking in adaptation planning—namely ideology and recognition. In an ideology-driven pathway, where beliefs are shared, adaptation efforts are mobilized through local actors and within public agencies who decide on the appropriateness of social equity definitions. Recognition-driven pathways occur when climate equity rhetoric is reflected and normalized through adaptation planning procedures, where cities strive to be early adopters of equitable climate strategies. This result therefore highlights the multiple ways urban leaders, decision-makers, and planners can have in steering policies and designing different planning and implementation processes.

Despite early optimism in cities’ leadership on climate adaptation planning, critics increasingly find that prevailing adaptation interventions are financially speculative, economically exclusive, and socially discriminatory. In this chapter, the authors discuss how emerging adaptation plans have taken on characteristics of climate urbanism by privileging the epistemologies, operations, and normative values of cities in the Global North, which in turn has shaped the scope, scale, strategies, and empirical evidence of adaptation actions on the ground. Dominant global imaginaries of climate-resilient futures prioritize technological fixes, decentralized and individual responsibility, consumption-led economic growth, and the securitization of upper-middle class values, experiences, and lifestyles. Adaptation planning practice has yet to recognize the long history of alternative epistemologies, everyday strategies, and normative socio-cultural values that tackle the drivers of systemic environmental, racial, and economic injustices in cities. Socio-political instability, even under currently observed warming trends, suggests that effective and just adaptation moving forward must be more political, relational, and anticipatory not only to biophysical changes but also to responses from the market, state, community, and social movements. Adaptation plans must therefore engage with epistemologies heretofore sidelined in the field, including critical political economy, embodied knowledge, postcolonial, anti-racist, and feminist studies. This chapter charts a way to comparatively view these alternative perspectives from “off the map” that are essential in pursuit of more just, equitable, and sustainable cities.

Non-technical summary We summarize what we assess as the past year's most important findings within climate change research: limits to adaptation, vulnerability hotspots, new threats coming from the climate–health nexus, climate (im)mobility and security, sustainable practices for land use and finance, losses and damages, inclusive societal climate decisions and ways to overcome structural barriers to accelerate mitigation and limit global warming to below 2°C. Technical summary We synthesize 10 topics within climate research where there have been significant advances or emerging scientific consensus since January 2021. The selection of these insights was based on input from an international open call with broad disciplinary scope. Findings concern: (1) new aspects of soft and hard limits to adaptation; (2) the emergence of regional vulnerability hotspots from climate impacts and human vulnerability; (3) new threats on the climate–health horizon – some involving plants and animals; (4) climate (im)mobility and the need for anticipatory action; (5) security and climate; (6) sustainable land management as a prerequisite to land-based solutions; (7) sustainable finance practices in the private sector and the need for political guidance; (8) the urgent planetary imperative for addressing losses and damages; (9) inclusive societal choices for climate-resilient development and (10) how to overcome barriers to accelerate mitigation and limit global warming to below 2°C. Social media summary Science has evidence on barriers to mitigation and how to overcome them to avoid limits to adaptation across multiple fields.

Local governments around the world are formulating different ways to address climate change. However, the compounding and overlapping vulnerabilities of historically marginalized residents are commonly tackled in a fragmented manner by conventional adaptation approaches, even when justice is presented as an overarching goal of these plans. In response, we propose an intersectional pivot in climate adaptation research and practice to analyze the interconnected forms of social-environmental injustices that drive vulnerabilities in cities, paving the way for more concrete and integrated strategies of just urban adaptation and transformation. This paper brings together narrative and analytical review methodologies to inform a new conceptual framework that highlights the need to (1) tackle underlying reinforcers of racial and gender inequalities; (2) redress drivers of differential vulnerabilities; (3) take politics and ethics of care seriously; (4) adopt place-based and place-making approaches; and (5) promote cross-identity forms of activism and community resilience building. We illustrate the framework with examples of ongoing projects in Barcelona, Spain, which is an early adopter of intersectional thinking and justice-driven principles in climate action. Although many initiatives are in a pilot phase and do not all exclusively focus on climate adaptation, experiences from Barcelona do provide illustrative directionality for innovative and integrated approaches that can address multiple and intersecting social-environmental inequities.

The potential for cascading disaster risks, especially in the context of extreme events, is well documented. However, concerted efforts to address cascading disaster risks in planning and local government decision-making have lagged. This paper explores the institutional drivers of planning for an emblematic form of cascading risk – wildfire-induced smoke and air pollution – by county governments in California. We qualitatively assess published plans and policies on disaster mitigation, climate change, air quality, and wildfire protection across California that are identified as having high exposure to wildfire smoke and have, consequently, developed corresponding institutional mechanisms to tackle it. We trace the regulatory, administrative, and procedural drivers behind efforts targeting prolonged drought as well as cascading risks where wildfire damages to physical assets lead to poor air quality across the region, which in turn contributes to negative human health impacts, particularly in communities with higher socioeconomic vulnerability. We find that although robust scientific data and planning frameworks are available to incentivize actions that address cascading risks, actual planning efforts continue to be restricted by political jurisdictional boundaries and a lack of cross-sectoral coordination between wildfire mitigation actions and corresponding efforts to reduce exposure of homes and critical infrastructure, improve regional air quality, or tackle the underlying health vulnerabilities to smoke and poor air quality at the community level. More long-term integrated and creative thinking around cascading risk pathways is therefore required to better address cascading risks across political jurisdictions.

Indian cities are especially vulnerable to climate change due to their rapid population growth, high levels of socioeconomic inequality, and the general inability of infrastructure and public services to adapt to projected impacts (Revi 2008; Sharma and Tomar 2010). Although the neoliberal reforms introduced in India since the early 1990s have enabled the broader participation of non-state actors in decision-making, an ideological preference for entrepreneurial approaches to urban governance have largely led to the withdrawal of the state from delivering basic services (Datta 2015). Revenue shortfalls and lack of administrative capacity have further decreased the ability of cities to deal with climate impacts and risks (Cook and Chu 2018; Sharma et al. 2014). These effects are felt most acutely by the urban poor, who are disproportionately exposed (Michael and Vakulabharanam 2016; Satterthwaite et al. 2007).

This article presents a narrative review of recent energy research that engages with critical sexuality, gender, and feminist theories. We find that these important theories are generally considered by the literature in three ways through identifying and framing the problem, designing implementation and governance processes, and offering long-term visioning and ideals. Emerging scholarship advances valuable insights on the unequal treatment of women and other minority groups. However, our review also highlights the need for more transversal ways - i.e., reading across disciplinary silos and multiple intersecting social identities - to interrogate the impacts of systemic oppression on energy issues. We argue that such a transversal approach to energy studies should prioritize engendering an epistemic community that promotes a relational awareness of historic and contemporary structures of oppression, facilitate innovative methodological approaches to research, and speak to more radical societal visions through mobilization and activism.

Learning lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic opens an opportunity for enhanced research and action on inclusive urban resilience to climate change. Lessons and their implications are used to describe a climate resilience research renewal agenda. Three key lessons are identified. The first lesson is generic, that climate change risk coexists and interacts with other risks through overlapping social processes, conditions and decision-making contexts. Two further lessons are urban specific: that networks of connectivity bring risk as well as resilience and that overcrowding is a key indicator of the multiple determinants of vulnerability to both COVID-19 and climate change impacts. From these lessons three research priorities arise: dynamic and compounding vulnerability, systemic risk and risk root cause analysis. These connected agendas identify affordable and healthy housing, social cohesion, minority and local leadership and multiscale governance as entry points for targeted research that can break cycles of multiple risk creation and so build back better for climate change as well as COVID-19 in recovery and renewal.

As experts predict that at least some irreversible climate change will occur with potentially disastrous effects on the lives and well-being of vulnerable communities around the world, it is paramount to ensure that these communities are resilient and have adaptive capacity to withstand the consequences. Adaptation and resilience planning present several ethical issues that need to be resolved if we are to achieve successful adaptation and resilience to climate change. In this paper, we present six core discussions that should be an integral part of adaptation and resilience planning: (i) Where does 'justice' feature in resilience and adaptation planning and what does it require in that regard?; (ii) How can it be ensured that adaptation and resilience strategies protect, take into consideration, and represent the interest of the most vulnerable individuals and communities?; (iii) How can different forms of knowledge be integrated within adaptation and resilience planning?; (iv) What trade-offs need to be made when focusing on resilience and adaptation and how can they be resolved?; (v) What roles and responsibilities do different actors have to build resilience and achieve adaptation?; (vi) Finally, what does the focus on ethics imply for the practice of adaptation and resilience planning?

This working paper discusses how governments can use practical, flexible approaches to determine if and how finance is supporting locally led adaptation (LLA) to climate change. As national governments invest in building resilience to climate impacts, many are recognizing the importance of LLA. LLA recognizes that people closest to the effects of climate change are often best placed to identify adaptation solutions and must have financing and decision-making power to ensure that adaptation investments reflect their priorities. The paper provides metrics for governments to track how much finance reaches the local level for adaptation, and how well that finance supports local agency in adaptation decisions. It also recommends tracking and reporting options governments can adapt to their country contexts and climate finance objectives. These recommendations are practical, near-term steps toward longer-term transformational change needed to support locally led adaptation. Tracking and reporting finance for LLA is important for ensuring adequate and sound investments, and ultimately for ensuring that finance reaches and meets the needs of those most directly affected by climate change.

In an international collaboration of planners, geographers and political scientists from the Universities of Birmingham and Zurich in 2017, we set out to explore the implications of the ideal of ‘the just city’ (Fainstein 2010) for evaluating and guiding urban planning and for identifying its democratic underpinnings by means of a comparative study of three cities across Europe. The scene was nicely set, with Fainstein’s principles for planning seeking to defend and further equity, enhance recognition of diversity, as well as encourage citizen participation against a global tendency towards policies that only benefit the interests of global capital. More generally, Fainstein refers to the capabilities approach, putting individuals’ opportunities with regard to life chances at centre stage. Complicating things, however, are the possible tensions between the dimensions of equity, diversity and democratic participation, leading Fainstein to prioritise the substantial dimensions of equity and diversity over the procedural dimension of democracy. In particular, she considers that participatory arrangements do not per se lead to equitable policies (notin-my-backyard attitudes, resistance to social mixing by homeowner associations, etc.), and participatory planning is therefore valued only as far as it contributes to equity and diversity. Her scepticism about the ability of democratic institutions more broadly to adequately represent various minorities and to forge meaningful coalitions (Fainstein 2010: 29, 52) leads her to direct her book at planners rather than politicians, where planners are to use participatory arrangements to press for egalitarian and inclusive solutions (Fainstein 2010: 173, 181). In this paper, we take Fainstein’s observations as a starting point but depart from her approach in two important ways. First, Fainstein’s planning principles seem to be intended primarily for the evaluation of single upcoming development projects and general social policies rather than for the guidance of citywide plans responding to spatial developments at the scale of the city or city region. Locational choices are already taken as a given, while spatially differential outcomes of general policies are not considered. Accordingly, the planning principles give little advice as to where a planning intervention is actually needed. In our approach, therefore, we take a decidedly spatial perspective, where urban planning primarily responds to citywide patterns of ‘spatial injustice’ (Soja 2009: 3), understood as lasting spatial structures of privilege and disadvantage that are being politically and societally produced and reproduced. Secondly, while sympathetic to Fainstein’s view that recognition of diversity does not preclude the existence of rather homogeneous neighbourhoods, we worry that accepting current concentrations of disadvantaged people in many city regions across the world does not serve their recognition but rather undermines their capabilities in terms of access to education and opportunities to reach advantageous social positions. This is why, in our approach to the just city, we see a strong role of urban planning in not only limiting further segregation, but proactively counteracting the already existing patterns of spatial injustice, positioning ourselves closer to the ‘equity planning’ approach (Krumholz, Forester 1990).1 In the following sections, we will summarise Fainstein’s principles for just city planning, followed by our spatial critique and an alternative framework for planning inspired by Soja, before we turn to key insights from our case studies on the selected domains of housing and urban renewal in the cities of Birmingham, Lyon and Zurich – cities coming from different traditions of planning, housing and local government. While the study also included extensive interviews with key stakeholders in all three cities, we here focus on summarising local efforts in urban renewal and housing policies in the context of ongoing processes of segregation and exclusion. We discuss how housing policies in Birmingham keep reproducing concentrations of deprivation, how Zurich’s reliance on non-profit housing associations limits its capacity to steer social mixing in the neighbourhoods, and how metropolitan efforts for spatial equity in Lyon is enhanced by the institutional setup and planning regulations in France. Against this Dr. Oliver Dlabac Centre for Democracy Studies Aarau, University of Zurich

We present BPAlt – a system which allows game developers to create and manage alternatives for Unreal Engine’s Blueprints Visual Scripting System. BPAlt allows the user to create, save, organize and swap Blueprint alternatives for rapid testing and experimentation. BPAlt also supports level alternatives, alternatives of alternatives through alternative scenarios, and allows merging of alternatives. We conducted a preliminary user study with 10 moderately skilled participants where we compared the usability, usefulness and creativity support of BPAlt to Unreal Engine alone for prototyping alternatives of game objects and mechanics in four different games. The findings suggest that the support for alternatives with the main features of BPAlt is beneficial in the game developers’ workflow as it supports exploration particularly well.

Evidence shows that current adaptation planning approaches are not always successful in generating actionable knowledge to guide implementation on the ground. There remains a persistent disconnect between the production of (physical) climate science and the implementation of practical, local, and context-specific adaptation actions. We argue for a need to incorporate “subaltern” knowledge (i.e., that which is typically labeled local, traditional, or indigenous knowledge) in climate adaptation science and practice. Building on recent comparative assessment studies, we identify limitations of current local adaptation action in its typical application of scientific knowledge and illustrate key pathways through which the subaltern can be integrated to better inform current approaches. We argue that subaltern knowledge can be a critical source of innovation and can help to broaden the adaptation solution space by enhancing both the effectiveness and the social legitimacy of actions.