Editing IPCC:AR6/WGII/Chapter-6 (section)

==== 6.3.6.2 Mitigation and Adaptation ====

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As analytical concepts, mitigation and adaptation have helped, over the years, to structure thinking and action around climate change. However, since AR5 there has been a growing debate about the adequacy of a neat separation between adaptation and mitigation ( [[#Castán%20Broto--2017|Castán Broto, 2017]] ).

The delivery of climate change action has revealed numerous co-benefits between adaptation and mitigation, around diverse areas such as implementing NBS and delivering health and development benefits (Ürge-Vorsatz et al., 2014; Suckall, Stringer and Tompkins, 2015; [[#Puppim%20de%20Oliveira--2016|Puppim de Oliveira and Doll, 2016]] ; Spencer et al., 2017). There has been a strong interest in delivering development benefits alongside climate mitigation, thus benefiting the overall infrastructure base (Suckall, Stringer and Tompkins, 2015). Some of these co-benefits have also emerged in experiences of urban planning, pointing toward the dilemma of separating adaptation and mitigation in a context in which integration, rather than an analytical differentiation, was seen as being required to transcend work in silos ( [[#Aylett--2015|Aylett, 2015]] ). Because urban planning needs to carefully consider long time scales, the neat separation between mitigation and adaptation runs counter to integrated forms of planning that can consider scales (time and space) carefully and that are aimed to deliver the sustainable city as a whole (Solecki et al., 2015; Grafakos et al., 2020).

For example, the ideas of climate resilient development and climate compatible development help planners to consider the simultaneous wins that emerge between adaptation, mitigation and development, requiring institutional building and partnerships to deliver triple win solutions (Stringer et al., 2014; Seo, Jaber and Srinivasan, 2017; [[#Mitchell--2010|Mitchell and Maxwell, 2010]] ). While the evidence base for the actual possibility of achieving such triple wins remains scarce (Tompkins et al., 2013; [[#Sharifi--2020|Sharifi, 2020]] ), emerging examples show important developments. For example, establishing safe and convenient walking and cycling infrastructure can lead to improvements in population health, thereby highlighting the close interaction between urban land use, infrastructure and population health (Schuster et al., 2017), while clean cooking has the potential to deliver positive health outcomes alongside improvements in air quality and emissions reductions and through reducing pressure on woodland as a fuel source for expanding urban populations ( [[#Msoffe--2017|Msoffe, 2017]] ). Furthermore, active transport infrastructure reduces air pollution and related health risks, and helps to mitigate further climate change (Schuster et al., 2017). These are supported by city networks such as the C40 Clean Air Cities Declaration and the Clean Air Coalition that complements WHO guidelines and standards, for example through the Breathe Life Campaign. In conclusion, in both urban environments and infrastructural sectors, triple wins are only realisable through broader perspectives that link climate compatible development to institutional change or the achievements of wider welfare objectives such as those enshrined in the United Nations 2030 Agenda of Development (Castán Broto et al., 2015; England et al., 2018) ( ''medium evidence'' , ''high agreement'' ).

The aspiration to deliver climate change action within a broader agenda of transformative change, introduced in the SREX report, received renewed attention after the publication of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, which argues for a focus on urban transformations and highlighted that informal settlements were vital for understanding the delivery of these transformations. Deep decarbonisation has emerged as a new idea that regards the development of low or zero carbon pathways as a condition for good adaptation in the long term. Decarbonisation becomes urgent in the face of growing impacts attributable to climate change (Ribera et al., 2015; Bataille et al., 2016; Wesseling et al., 2017). Urbanisation opens opportunities for deep mitigation in low-impact developments, and hence, it is imperative to understand the implications of those opportunities for climate action ( [[#Mulugetta--2018|Mulugetta and Broto, 2018]] ). These gains are not limited to urban areas. The reliance on connected urban–rural systems for water, food and fuel has led to city government and urban-based businesses supporting landscape adaptations in rural hinterlands with strong potential for mitigation and rural development co-benefits. Water Funds bring downstream urban public and private finance to support upstream rural residents to make land use and agricultural management decisions to avoid damaging runoff, soil erosion and downstream sedimentation with reduction in water quality and increased flood risk. There are more than 30 Water Funds in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. These operate at landscape scale; the Upper Tana-Nairobi Water Fund, Kenya (Vogl et al., 2017), planned for a USD 10 million investment in Water Fund-led conservation interventions, with a projected return of USD 21.5 million in economic benefits over a 30-year timeframe ( [[#Apse--2015|Apse and Bryant, 2015]] ). However, these investments do not occur where communities lack funding or the institutions to direct funding from downstream beneficiaries to upstream residents (Brauman et al., 2019).

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'''Box 6.4 | Adapting to Concurrent Risk: COVID-19 and Urban Climate Change'''
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COVID-19 impacts have highlighted the depth and unevenness of systemic social vulnerability and the compounding characteristics of contemporary development models, with direct relevance to climate change risk accumulation and its reduction (Patel et al., 2020b; [[#Manzanedo--2020|Manzanedo and Manning, 2020]] ; [[#Bahadur--2020|Bahadur and Dodman, 2020]] ). This is plain at the global level: of the estimated 119–124 million additional people induced into poverty by COVID-19 in 2020, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa each contribute two-fifths (Lakner et al., 2021). These are rapidly urbanising and highly climate-hazard-exposed world regions, indicating COVID-19 impacts may further concentrate risk in these regions. Within cities, COVID-19 and climate change risk and loss is concurrent by gender, race and income or livelihood, for example, when vulnerable elderly populations are simultaneously exposed to COVID-19 and heatwave risk. Globally, in 2020, about 431.7 million vulnerable people were exposed to extreme heat during the COVID-19 pandemic, including about 75.5 million during the July and August 2020 European heatwave, with an excess mortality of over 9000 people arising from heat exposure ( [[#Walton--2020|Walton and van Aalst, 2020]] ).

The pandemic has demonstrated the multiple, often reinforcing, ways in which specific drivers of vulnerability interact both in generating urban risk and shaping who is more or less able to recover (Phillips et al., 2020; Honey-Rosés et al., 2020) (see [[#6.2|Section 6.2]] ). Again, this is not a new lesson for urban climate change adaptation, but it is a lesson that has not yet been seen to enter into routine practice for urban adaptation. Two key challenges for climate change adaptation are the associations between COVID-19 risk and urban connectivity and overcrowding. Connectivity has been presented in urban adaptation policy as a virtue, a means to share risk and diversity inputs (Ge et al., 2019; [[#Kim--2020|Kim and Bostwick, 2020]] ), COVID-19 has surfaced the unevenness with which people and places are connected and also the need to balance connectivity against risk transfer, through the failure of food supply chains or remittance flows, as well as by the direct transfer of disease (Challinor et al., 2018). High-density living has advantages for urban resource efficiency including benefiting climate change mitigation. When high-density living is not supported by adequate access to critical infrastructure (sufficient internal living space, access to potable water and sanitation, access to open green space), this exacerbates overcrowding and generates vulnerability to multiple risks, including climate change hazards and communicable disease (Bamweyana et al., 2020; Hamidi, Sabouri and Ewing, 2020; [[#Peters--2020|Peters, 2020]] ; Satterthwaite et al., 2020). Where overcrowding coincides with precarious livelihoods, for example in informal settlements, risk is further elevated ( [[#Wilkinson--2020|Wilkinson, 2020]] ). Neighbourhood associations (a benefit of high-density living) have been an important source of resilience through providing trusted information, access to food and water for washing during the pandemic and serving populations unable to access government or market provision (Pelling et al., 2021). Here local organising has not only met gaps in service provision, but opened dialogue to vision and organise for alternative development futures. These distinctly urban challenges should be read as a sub-set of wider cross-cutting lessons for recovery from COVID-19 (see Cross-Chapter Box COVID in Chapter 7).

Where responses to COVID-19 include addressing inequities in social infrastructure, this opens a considerable and potentially society-wide opportunity to reduce social vulnerability to climate change risks (see Cross-Chapter Box COVID in Chapter 7).

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