The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) and SDU.Resilience has launched Seizing the Urban Opportunity: a 3-step guide for strengthening NDCs 3.0. This report aims to help policymakers, climate planners, and other stakeholders ensure that Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are inclusive, locally grounded, and implementation-ready.
Despite cities consuming 78% of the world’s energy and producing over 60% of greenhouse gas emissions, they remain largely overlooked in national climate planning. Only 27% of NDCs currently include strong urban content. Financing remains a major challenge, and urban needs for funding, technology, and capacity-building are outnumbered by national-level requests up to 40 to 1.
As countries prepare to submit their third-round Nationally Determined Contributions in 2025, this guideline offers a practical framework to embed local governments and their urban priorities into national climate plans and reflects the challenges and opportunities at the local level.
📘 Download the full guide here.
Key insights
- Only 40% of current NDCs include both urban mitigation and adaptation strategies.
- 73% of NDCs still contain no, low, or only moderate urban content.
- Local governments are uniquely positioned to contribute to climate solutions but they need to be clearly reflected in national commitments.
- The guide introduces a 3-step approach to assess, prepare, and co-design stronger urban content in NDCs.
The 3-step framework
- Assess: review urban content in existing NDCs and map the wider policy environment.
- Prepare: strengthen multilevel governance and align local-national climate priorities through structured consultations.
- Co-design: co-develop with local governments robust urban contributions in NDCs, including baselines, sector challenges, actions, and enablers like finance and capacity building.