Global evidence linking local development-oriented urban actions to climate change mitigation and adaptation

Cities’ action is essential to achieving the global climate target, but it is invariably anchored in the real-world constraints and motivations, and indirectly contributes to climate co-benefits. However, much of literature organizes from a climate-first perspective, offering limited insight into how local development topics, urban actions, and climate impacts intersect across cities. This critical gap fails to capture how most development-oriented urban actions subtly affect emissions or climate resilience, which ultimately may result in less effective outcomes. In this study, we systematically evaluate 5,610 studies across over 750 cities, linking city types, local development topics, urban actions, and associated climate impacts, based on an AI-assisted knowledge extraction pipeline. Our findings show disparities in the evidence of urban action worldwide, which are rooted in local development topics associated with their profiles and constrained by their own capacity. The evidence is uneven, with nature-based (19%), energy (19%), and transport (16%) related actions accounting for roughly 53%. Evidence on blue–green infrastructure covering more than 150 cities globally, while some actions (such as shared automated electric transportation) are city-specific. Even the same actions (e.g., waste prevention, minimization and management) are associated with different climate co-benefits across cities. More effort is needed to close remaining gaps and capture lessons from specific urban cases. Analyzing urban action with a development-oriented perspective helps explain climate impacts of local action, and supports urban practitioners in leveraging their strengths to respond to diverse development topics while delivering climate co-benefits.