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The Findings from Innovate4Cities 2021 and Update to the Global Research and Action Agenda details the research, policy, and public discussions key to advancing climate research and action in cities. This report documents key outcomes of the Innovate4Cities 2021 Conference (October 2021) and highlights current objectives and motivations, research gaps and priorities. Furthermore, this document presents a regional analysis of research and innovation needs falling under the original GRAA topical research areas and cross cutting issues (Edmonton 2018) and expanding to issues which emerged between the 2018 and 2021 conferences. This report has been developed by Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy (GCoM) and UN-Habitat based on the outcomes of 2021 Innovate4Cities Conference co-hosted by UN-Habitat, GCoM and co-sponsored by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It is intended to inform research, policy and public discussions on the global research and action agenda for cities and climate change science. The authors have sought to ensure the accuracy of the material in this document, but they will not be liable for any ramifications incurred through the use of this report.

The Working Group II contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report assesses the impacts of climate change, looking at ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities at global and regional levels. It also reviews vulnerabilities and the capacities and limits of the natural world and human societies to adapt to climate change.

Many African towns and cities face a range of hazards, which can best be described as representing a “spectrum of risk” of events that can cause death, illness or injury, and impoverishment. Yet despite the growing numbers of people living in African urban centres, the extent and relative severity of these different risks is poorly understood. This paper provides a rationale for using a spectrum of methods to address this spectrum of risk, and demonstrates the utility of mixed‐methods approaches in planning for resilience. It describes activities undertaken in a wide‐ranging multi‐country programme of research, which use multiple approaches to gather empirical data on risk, in order to build a stronger evidence base and provide a more solid base for planning and investment. It concludes that methods need to be chosen in regard to social, political economic, biophysical and hydrogeological context, while also recognising the different levels of complexity and institutional capacity in different urban centres. The paper concludes that as well as the importance of taking individual contexts into account, there are underlying methodological principles – based on multidisciplinary expertise and multi‐faceted and collaborative research endeavours – that can inform a range of related approaches to understanding urban risk in sub‐Saharan Africa and break the cycle of risk accumulation., Many African towns and cities face a range of hazards, which can best be described as representing a “spectrum of risk” of events that can cause death, illness or injury, and impoverishment. This paper provides a rationale for using a spectrum of methods to address this spectrum of risk, and demonstrates the utility of mixed‐methods approaches in planning for resilience.

There is an increasing recognition of the need to understand and address risks of various kinds in African cities. However, there have been very few explicit examinations of the way in which the specific characteristics of African urbanisation and urbanism drive risk, or the way in which responses to risk should take these characteristics into account. This paper presents a critical review of the key features of African urban experiences, and analyses the implications for the creation and reduction of diverse risks, from the everyday to the extensive. It argues that the physical forms, social structures, economic pathways, and governance systems of cities on the continent shape their risk profiles. Of particular importance are the nature of spatial expansion, the demographic profiles of cities, and the prevalence of informal economies and settlements; while the reform of governance systems will be critical to enable risk reduction. The paper concludes that urban development actors need to consider the consequences of their actions for risk, while risk reduction practitioners will need to engage with all elements of urban development, including informality, urban poverty, infrastructure and service provision, land management, and local governance capacity.

Kingston is a city facing serious environmental challenges. In common with other Third World cities, these have usually been documented from the perspective of affluent and powerful urban residents. Very little research has explored the spatial and social distribution of environmental problems in the city, or has examined the ways that individual citizens from a variety of backgrounds understand the urban environment. These problems have often been packaged as discrete issues, when in fact they cannot be understood or alleviated without knowledge of their economic, political, and cultural aspects. Urban environmental problems require political solutions that address uneven power relations and ineffective structures of urban governance. In this thesis, I address these issues in Kingston through an application of the themes of nature, power and participation. A mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods were used to explore the ways in which urban residents from different age, gender and class backgrounds construct the city and its environmental problems. The knowledge of marginalised individuals and groups is placed in the foreground and is used to provide an alternative analysis of Kingston’s ecology. These understandings are then used to assess critically the structures of urban governance, and to suggest possible changes that could be made to these. The research confirms that there are significant environmental problems in Kingston, and that these have serious negative impacts on many urban residents. It shows that these problems are understood differently by the various social groups within the city, and that the burdens of environmental problems vary socio-spatially across the Kingston Metropolitan Area. Despite this, there is a general consensus that environmental improvement is desirable. However, for this to be achieved there need to be fundamental alterations in the social structures and political organisation of the city.

This chapter assesses the impacts of climate change on, and the prospects for adaptation in, rural areas. Rural areas include diverse patterns of settlement, infrastructure, and livelihoods, and relate in complex ways with urban areas. The chapter shows that rural areas experience specific vulnerabilities to climate change, both through their dependence on natural resources and weather-dependent activities and their relative lack of access to information, decision making, investment, and services. Adaptation strategies will need to address these vulnerabilities. Some of the key starting points, which affect the scope and coverage of literature assessed in this chapter, are as follows: • Rural areas, even after significant demographic shifts, still account for 3.3 billion people, or almost half (47.9%) of the world's total population (UN DESA Population Division, 2013). • The overwhelming majority of the world's rural population (3.1 billion people, or 91.7% of the world's rural population, or 44.0% of the world's total population) live in less developed or least developed countries (UN DESA Population Division, 2013). • Rural dwellers also account for about 70% of the developing world's poor people. IFAD (2010) states that around 70% of the extreme poor in developing countries lived in rural areas in 2005. Ravallion et al. (2007), using 2002 data and poverty lines of US$1.08 or US$2.15, in each case with urban poverty lines adjusted upward to recognize additional non-food spending, give a figure of around 75% of people, under either poverty line, being rural. • Rural areas are a spatial category, associated with certain patterns of human activity, but with those associations being subject to continuous change. • Rural areas are largely defined in contradistinction to urban areas, but that distinction is increasingly seen as problematic. • Rural populations have, and will have, a variety of income sources and occupations, within which agriculture and the exploitation of natural resources have privileged, but not necessarily predominant, positions.