Watch Now | Cities as Solutions to Climate Change: Perspectives from IPCC Authors

The 9th annual Hixon Center Urban Conference (September 23, 2022) brought researchers and practitioners together to discuss the potential impacts that cities have on climate change around the globe.

The conference featured Benjamin Sovacool, IGS Director and co-author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report, as part of a plenary panel on Net-Zero Carbon Cities and Electrification: The Next Global Agenda.

In the ‘avoid, shift, improve’ framework in chapter five of the IPCC report, “it suggests that as you decarbonize things like transport, the solution isn’t only to avoid the need for cars, it’s also to shift towards more energy-efficient modes like mass transit or cycling, and to continue to invest in innovation—improving fuel efficiency, or parking spaces, or the size of vehicles, or the weight of vehicles, or better pollution control devices.” — Benjamin Sovacool