2024 has been a tumultuous year: More than half the world’s population went to the ballot box — some voting for radical change — extraordinary weather events have devastated communities and countries have been rocked by continued violent conflict.
Given their unique position straddling local, national and global politics, cities will face new challenges navigating different levels of government and their own electorates. What does it all mean for how cities will address the climate challenge and equitable development, where leadership and action in urban areas are so important? What does it mean for building sustainable cities?
During the last quarter of the year, a series of high-profile international summits have begun to parse what lies ahead for urban priorities in 2025: from the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP16) in Cali, Colombia, to the World Urban Forum in Cairo, to the Urban20 Summit in Rio de Janeiro and to the annual UN climate summit (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan.
It’s time to assess the progress and setbacks cities faced this year and navigate the pathway to sustainable cities in 2025.
Elections: Shifting Electorates, Shifting Priorities
2024 was a “super year” for elections, with dozens of major contests around the world. It was also a year where incumbents suffered. Whether left or right, ruling parties from South Africa, India, the United Kingdom and the United States took losses at the polls. This strong desire for change creates unique dynamics for cities.
US Cities and a New Trump Administration
After Donald Trump’s reelection to lead the world’s largest economy, all eyes will be on U.S. cities, states and other local governments and organizations. Just a week after his November 5 win, many attending COP29 already felt the gravity of this decision, with fear that the U.S. would once again withdraw from the international Paris Agreement on climate change overshadowing negotiations.
In 2017, when Trump first announced the U.S. would pull out from the Paris Agreement, and federal support and resources were stripped from many national climate initiatives, efforts like America Is All In and the U.S. Climate Alliance brought together thousands of mayors, governors, university presidents and business leaders to continue meeting emissions-reduction targets. Those coalitions never went away and can now catalyze similar action to sustain climate targets from the city-level on up.
Shifting voter bases in cities, however, could create bigger tensions in 2025 between Republican and Democratic priorities. New York City, for example, saw a notable 7% increase in the conservative vote share for president compared to 2020. In addition, each of the so-called “battleground” states voted Republican at the presidential level.
The good news is that President Joe Biden’s enormous push for green infrastructure development, which includes e-mobility, public transport and renewable energy has some bipartisan support, thanks to about 77% of total financial investments going to Republican districts. Much of this money also lies in the hands of states to distribute and cannot be pulled back.
Also, housing and workforce participation are two key overlapping objectives supported on both sides of the aisle that can contribute to low-carbon, resilient and inclusive communities. The housing crisis in the U.S. is severe, with tens of millions of households spending more than 30% of their income on housing (if they are able to find a home at all). This impacts individuals but also businesses and their ability to tap into the labor pool needed to grow the economy. Bringing jobs and more affordable housing closer together will be an attractive offer that can garner support in many cities, from Seattle and San Francisco to Phoenix, Houston and Miami.
Though the framing might differ, prioritizing affordable housing near infrastructure investments to support economic growth can still drive a low-carbon agenda in U.S. cities.
A New Political Economy for European Cities
As significant as it is, the outcome of the U.S. elections should also be seen in the context of a global trend away from incumbents and the status quo, as well as away from globalization and toward nationalism. Europe’s shift to the right in the European Parliament and in national elections in the Netherlands, Italy, France and Germany (with snap national elections expected in February 2025), including a shifting voter base in cities, will continue to have repercussions.
While the dimensions and priorities of these electorates and their leadership have changed, the city priorities have not. A recent Eurocities survey of nearly 100 mayors identified 67% of mayors prioritizing climate action; 31%, social inclusion and equity; and 30%, affordable housing. What should the top priorities of the next European Commission be? Mayors from across the political spectrum said investing in sustainable urban mobility (55%), access to affordable housing (54%), and a long-term strategy for the EU and cities to work better together (49%).
A big challenge for mayors will be how to find unified support for what might look like a purely progressive agenda, but which simply aligns with fundamental urban dynamics: balancing scarce land and infrastructure, in densely populated centers, with relatively plentiful jobs and services.
Paris, under Mayor Anne Hidalgo, has implemented a proximity-based, “15-minute city” development strategy with great success. It’s become more walkable, bikeable and much more attractive to families with children by greening the city and by providing childcare and services at the neighborhood level. However, the idea has received fierce pushback from some on the right and even been caught up in conspiracy theories. How to continue implementing sustainable city efforts like these, while confronting people’s fears, will be a major challenge for Europe’s cities as heat and other hazards increase.
Housing: The New Lever for Climate and the Economy
At this year’s World Urban Forum in Cairo, UN-Habitat’s new Executive Director Anacláudia Rossbach called out the elephant in the room: An extraordinary number of people — just over 1 billion, or one-quarter, of all urban dwellers around the world — lack access to affordable housing and services.
With an additional 2.5 billion urban dwellers by 2050 due to population growth and people migrating from rural areas, 90% of which will be in Africa and Asia, one can only imagine how the city of the future could look like. This would not be a future of shiny towers and high-end apartment buildings, but one where perhaps half of the urban fabric might include informal settlements and low-income housing, with little to no access to city services. Without resolving access to housing and services in a way that is affordable and avoids locking in carbon-intensive lifestyles, it will be impossible to ever achieve local and national economic development and climate targets.
The housing crisis extends globally, and cities will have to respond to different demographic and economic contexts. In the U.S. and Europe, affordable housing has received support from across the political spectrum and might be the best bet to sustainably transform cities and related infrastructure.
In developing countries, this is a human rights challenge. The urgency is clearly understood by Indonesia’s new president, Prabowo Subianto, who only one month into the job proposed an ambitious plan to build 3 million houses a year. With most of the Indonesian population living in coastal areas, a housing program cannot be implemented without climate-proofing nor embedding services that help low-income families tap into city resources and jobs.
REHOUSE, an alliance that brings together organizations with over 100,000 staff working in slums and informal settlements around the world, is a response to the need for scaled interventions to build resilient and equitable housing integrated with core urban services for all. More dedicated investments for housing might be the best lever to drive change in cities everywhere.
Adaptation: Prioritizing People’s Safety and Health
Extreme weather events continue to devastate many cities, with 2024 surpassing last year as the hottest on record.
Brazil’s southern state of Rio Grande do Sul experienced disastrous flooding in May, which impacted more than 2 million people, including those in the city of Porto Alegre; 172 people lost their lives and an astounding 80,000 people ended up in shelters. At the same time, Kenya and other areas of East Africa experienced a similar disaster. The staggering toll included 294 fatalities, affecting over 100,000 households. In Nairobi, over 40,000 households living in informal settlements were displaced, many of whom were living right up against the major rivers of the city.
Then in late October, a high-altitude isolated depression struck eastern Spain, bringing severe weather, torrential rainfall and flash floods that killed 224 people. The image of car wrecks in the historic streets of Valencia, piled on top of each other in a torrent of debris and mud, was a reminder that no city will escape the impacts of a changing climate.
Alongside the floods was heat. A record-breaking heat wave in India impacted millions of people and entire urban economies. Districts in Delhi hit nearly 50 degrees C (122 degrees F) and nearly 80% of the Indian population was exposed to strong or very strong heat stress for more than 6 hours in the first 15 days of April. Even air conditioning struggled to keep up under the circumstances. Additionally, the extreme heat made deadly air pollution even worse. People in Indian cities had to change their work and life schedules in significant ways to adapt.
These health and economic impacts of climate change are challenges cities and residents are dealing with now. But WRI analysis of future climate hazards shows a world in which the intensity and frequency of impacts could increase much more dramatically in the future. Analyzing climate hazards for 996 of the world’s largest cities — home to 2.1 billion people (26% of the global population) — the projections show a sizable difference between 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) and 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F) of warming for urban areas, underscoring the need for mitigation to reduce future warming, but also for city and national governments to begin planning more adaptation measures to help people deal with heat now.
Municipal leaders are already receiving pressure for more adaptation measures. Nairobi’s governor installed the Nairobi River Commission, for example, to rethink how the city’s rivers can be safer and reclaim their functions from the clogged, polluted hazards they have become. Cities will increasingly look at passive cooling solutions, too, such as increasing tree cover, greening roofs, painting roofs white and protecting waterbodies in and around cities to reduce the impact of heat.
Yet too few cities have comprehensive adaptation strategies in place.
Nature-based solutions have a key role to play. For example, our teams calculated that a $5.2-million investment in nature-based solutions for Bogotá’s watershed could provide $42 million in returns for the city’s water supply. And research for Mumbai’s first-ever Climate Action Plan shows a strong correlation between vegetation cover and lower land surface temperatures. Indeed, at the UN Biodiversity Conference in Cali this year, cities and city organizations focused discussions on how to build climate resilience with nature within urban areas.
These developments point to a shifting relationship between cities and adaptation. Whereas national targets on greenhouse gas emissions reduction and phasing out fossil fuels may suffer from less ambitious efforts and negotiations on the global stage, adaptation will climb further as a top priority in local politics, where climate risks — along with people’s concerns about them — are rising.
Sustainable Transportation: Transforming the Marketplace
Transportation will be the biggest growth area among urban infrastructure by 2050, simply due to the level of demand. After China, India is leading the way. Its metro network is set to be among the world’s largest. How these investments integrate into the urban fabric and how to create first- and last-mile connectivity to and from transit remain critical questions for cities.
Transit-oriented development, built around public transport, is an example of how to provide access to as many people as possible, with as few emissions as possible, while driving economic development.
But India’s success at expanding public transport investment at such a large scale can’t be replicated in many developing countries, which are growing more slowly and have less creditworthiness. Increased finance for transport is direly needed with sufficient guarantees to crowd in private capital. Looking at the global climate finance landscape for transport, it is stunning to see that 72% is invested in private road transport. These investments are out of balance with what that data shows us: Most of the urban population in developing economies walk or are dependent on public transportation. Financing institutions must help steer cities away from fully car-dependent, carbon intensive, unhealthy patterns of growth, a mistake made with eyes wide shut in the 20th century that is proving very difficult to reverse.
With new climate finance goals and money after the COP29 agreement, the question for 2025 is not only about the quantity of finance, but the quality of it. More roads alone will not lead to better mobility and healthier cities. It will be difficult to provide access to services in cities, in a clean and equitable way, when the obsessive focus on private fossil fuel transport continues to persist. Blended finance, which can reduce financial risk for private finance but still crowd it in, should focus on active mobility, public transport and electric mobility, as new WRI research on access to climate finance shows.
A focus on market transformation for sustainable transportation can support the shift toward public transportation, active mobility and electric mobility. This includes de-risking vehicle purchases to incentivize market demand, in particular for electric 2- and 3-wheelers, which are quickly overtaking the streets of African and Asian cities, as well as setting up charging infrastructure. Aggregation and smart procurement is another lever to pull. India’s national e-bus program, aiming to procure more than 50,000 electric buses, was made possible by pooling demand from 169 cities across the country. It’s helped procure more than 10,000 vehicles already and drive down the costs of an e-bus 27% below the costs of a diesel bus.
There is an enormously dynamic finance landscape ahead to meet the massive transportation demands in growing cities. If done right, this economic development proposition can and will build low-carbon transport options for all, even in a changing global political context.
Driving Change from the Bottom Up
In a drastically changed political landscape and with faltering negotiations at COP29, the climate agenda is under pressure. We should be clear-eyed about the challenges ahead. Coordination between local and national governments — critical for cities to fully exercise their ambitions for sustainable development — may be more difficult in many places. Research from the Coalition for Urban Transitions shows that, globally, cities have the mandate and ability to achieve just a third of their emissions reduction potential on their own. The other two-thirds can only be achieved by working together with, or solely by, national governments.
But these trends are not universal. Indeed, Brazil, as one of the first countries to release its updated 2025 nationally determined contribution (NDC) to the Paris Agreement, stands as an exception. The updated climate plan creates a new instrument for coordinating climate action across cities, states and regions, and combines with existing policies and civil society networks to significantly strengthen the role of cities in Brazil’s NDC process.
As the climate world turns towards COP30 in Belem, Brazil, under the leadership of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil has taken the lead in operationalizing the principles of the CHAMP Initiative, a partnership coordinated by Bloomberg Philanthropies, supported by WRI and endorsed by 76 countries to support improved multilevel partnerships in NDCs and climate action. With this momentum, there’s hope that Brazil’s leadership will inspire other countries and cities to push for partnerships to raise climate ambition.
There are pathways for cities globally to continue implementing elements of ambitious climate action as part of their core mandate to keep people safe, improve quality of life and drive local economic development. But to ensure cities get sufficient resources, urban transformation will need to be reframed on national and local agendas.
One way is to focus on climate as a co-benefit to economic gains, to keep people safe and provide services to the electorate. That certainly counts for cities in the U.S. and increasingly in Europe, but also for rapidly growing cities in Africa and South Asia, which have understandably been focused on creating jobs, providing housing and managing climate risks.
Nature-based solutions have proven to be much needed and effective in managing heat and water in cities while creating much better quality of life. Examples of market transformation for electric mobility are promising to achieve the scale needed, create jobs and attract more private capital. These solutions are less vulnerable to ideological agendas and provide more immediate benefits to residents. Demand for neighborhoods based on proximity and quality of life has also never been bigger, with surveys showing majority support even in car-dominant societies like the U.S.
Without being overly optimistic about the multiple crises facing the world at this moment, the urban agenda is more relevant and stronger than ever. It will prove to be resilient to political change, serving the entire political spectrum in halls of power around the world and both industrialized and industrializing country agendas.
Change will happen from the bottom up, and cities will be the missing piece of many puzzles that will drive positive change for people, nature and climate.