Climate change and global warming are increasingly impacting urban areas worldwide

The gap

Evidence profile

Sourced from the abstract and stated challenges and inline gaps and future work and future-work section of the source papers, classified as general, drawn from work published between 2025 and 2026, spanning 5 journals. Those papers have been cited 11 times in total.

Supporting evidence — 6 representative gaps

• Naar het ontsluiten van het potentieel van particuliere tuinen voor klimaatadaptatie en -mitigatie in Vlaanderen, België (2026) · Lirias

  Consequently, the climate change adaptation role of the garden complex remains insufficiently quantified, weakly embedded in urban planning frameworks, and inconsistently translated into concrete policy measures, leaving a significant opportunity for more equitable and climate-resilient cities untapped.

  generalabstractevidence 5/5
  Keywords: climate consequently change adaptation role garden complex remains insufficiently quantified weakly embedded urban planning frameworks
• Spatial associations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations with climate exposure, green cover, and socioeconomic advantage in New South Wales, Australia (2026) · Regional Environmental Change · doi

  Climate change and global warming are increasingly impacting urban areas worldwide. Urban populations are not equally affected by these challenges. There is a need for fine-scale, longitudinal, and community research to inform urban climate adaptation planning.

  generalstated challengesevidence 5/5
  Keywords: climate change global warming increasingly impacting urban areas
• Drought projections in a high-latitude continental region of Quebec (2026) · Discover Environment · doi

  This persis- tence demands a proactive, science-informed, and locally grounded approach to adapta- tion planning, where both climatic and human systems are jointly addressed to build resilience in the face of accelerating climate change; an issue that needs to be further investigated. These need to be investigated further. Despite a general increase in precipitation across the region, the persistence of negative SPAI values in several municipalities indicates that increased precipitation alone is insufficient to offset long-term moisture deficits.

  generalinline gapsevidence 5/5
  Keywords: further investigated precipitation persis tence demands proactive science informed locally grounded approach adapta tion planning
• Aligning local adaptation needs with ETCCDI indices in Freudenstadt, a German municipality (2026) · Regional Environmental Change · doi

  This study shows that linking municipal experience with cli- mate indices improves the practical use of climate informa- tion in adaptation planning. In Freudenstadt, impacts from heavy precipitation, low snowfall, heat, and drought were identified. These practitioner-identified impacts guided the selection of four ETCCDI climate indices that match local experience. High-resolution, bias-corrected, convective- permitting simulations then revealed long-term changes and spatial differences in potential climatic impacts across the district. As well as documenting change, the indices help to trans- late climate projections into locally meaningful signals. The projected increase in summer days indicates growing heat stress risks relevant to urban planning and public health. The decline in frost days highlights challenges for snow- dependent tourism and winter services, while the increase in dry days suggests rising drought impacts, particularly for agriculture. Regarding heavy precipitation days, the simula- tions indicate heterogeneous spatial changes, with increases in the eastern and southern areas, and partly non-robust sig- nals, highlighting the importance of transparent communica- tion of uncertainty. By expressing climate change in terms of indices that reflect observed impacts, this approach ena- bles local stakeholders to relate their everyday experience to longer-term projections. As ETCCDI indices are widely used, they facilitate intermunicipal comparisons and provide a shared baseline for discussing region-specific adaptation approaches. However, the findings also highlight that the need for adaptation-related information is often department-spe- cific, and that additional indicators are required to capture planning-related conditions that are not fully represented by standard ETCCDI indices. Some locally significant impacts are not directly tied to discrete extremes, yet remain impor- tant for strategic planning. Therefore, complementing the selected ETCCDI indices with more tailored indicators can increase their overall usability. Indices capturing night-time cooling or prolonged heat can support urban development, while indices capturing snowfall, snow reliability, and black ice indices can strengthen the information base for tourism and winter maintenance. For long-term water management, indicators capturing extended droughts, persistent rainfall, and compound events can help public utility companies to assess changing water balance conditions. Future studies could strengthen the connection between climate information and local needs by involving scientists, stakeholders, and decision-makers in co-design processes from the onset. Previous work has highlighted the benefits of such an approach (Schipper et al. 2016; Abegg et al. 2021).

  generalfuture workevidence 5/5
  Keywords: indices impacts climate planning etccdi days experience adaptation heat local term increase information indicators capturing
• Mainstreaming climate change adaptation into urban planning—A pragmatic protocol to tackle the implementation gap (2025) · Frontiers in Climate · cited 11× · doi

  Despite the growing body of scientific literature on mainstreaming climate change adaptation (CCA) into urban planning and numerous implementation guidelines, adaptation remains insufficiently integrated across sectors and scales in urban development, particularly in cities in the Global South.

  generalabstractevidence 5/5
  Keywords: adaptation urban despite growing body scientific literature mainstreaming climate change planning numerous implementation guidelines remains
• Deciphering Urban Flood Drivers: An Explainable Machine Learning Approach to Vulnerability Assessment in Indonesian Catchments (2026) · Hydrology · doi

  incorporate higher-resolution local datasets, - conduct independent validation across diverse geographic settings, - integrate CMIP6 climate projections and dynamic socioeconomic indicators to enable spatiotemporal forecasting under climate change and urbanisation scenarios

  generalfuture-work sectionevidence 5/5
  Keywords: incorporate higher-resolution local datasets conduct independent validation across

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