photo: Craig Nagy, flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Cities and other urban environments play a key role in a global response to climate change. Unfortunately, it appears extremely complicated to govern the transition towards urban sustainability and resilience. Dr Jeroen van der Heijden discusses both governance barriers and their solutions, arguing that while there are sufficient traditional and innovative governance tools available to guide a transformation towards urban sustainability and resilience, policy-makers have to be brave and start mandating these.

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Climate change is a problem that is unprecedented in its scale, scope, duration, complexity, uncertainty and inequity. The debate about climate policy is muddled, confused, confusing, ill-informed, hysterical and acrimonious. It need not be. Climate change is a difficult issue, but not beyond human wit. Richard Tol, Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex, explains how his new book on climate economics offers the reader a set of tools that, if properly applied, can shed light on the aims and implementation of climate policy. […]

Professor Carlo Carraro, Director of the International Center for Climate Governance (ICCG), summarises the key points from the 19^th Conference of Parties (COP19) (originally published in December on his ICCG blog). […]