Seventeen city types define distinct pathways for climate mitigation and adaptation worldwide

Understanding that cities are main arenas of climate action, it remains unclear which cities should focus on what kind of action taking a global comparative lens. Recent contributions identified four different types of cities across seven world regions, while others specified a huge case study literature database on cities and climate change biased towards established, stagnant, and megacities, largely ignoring smaller, rapidly growing cities, mostly in the Global South. Here, we comprehensively assess climate issues, climate actions, and their main political entry points and feasibility challenges for 17 types of cities. For this, we rely on three different data modalities: a) a global database of more than 10000 cities and 16 different quantitative characteristics; b) AI assisted full-pdf analysis of more than 1200 pdfs on representative cities of 17 different types; and c) AI-assisted web-based analysis of representative cities and their challenges. While the first two steps enable evidence identification with medium to high confidence, the last steps allows to fill crucial gaps and debias the analysis, albeit subject to low confidence insights. We find that smaller and poorer cities in Africa and Asia are strongly motivated to develop WASH infrastructure, that rapidly growing and megacities will need to focus on future proof urban planning, and that established cities, mostly in Europe, North America and East Asia, but also cities in small island states aim to disentangle from costly gas and oil dependence in heating and transport sectors. Cities that aim for net-zero are co-motivated by a high quality of life.