Abstract
Cities play a leading role in climate change actions and solutions, yet city-level case study sources remain fragmented, biased towards large cities, and inaccessible to local practitioners, notably in the Global South. In response, the Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN) is developing a City Solutions Case Study Atlas (City CSA), a centralized and searchable online platform that integrates diverse case studies focused on climate solutions with an interactive global map containing multiple data layers. The UCCRN City CSA provides an evidence base for academics, urban policymakers, city practitioners, city networks, civil society, and the financial sector to facilitate equitable knowledge transfer and support the development and implementation of context-specific, science-informed urban climate solutions. This paper presents the framework, metadata, and structure of the UCCRN City CSA and assesses metadata search filters and large language model (LLM)-assisted discourse analysis as complementary tools for three user types.
Data availability
All data supporting the findings of this study are cited within the paper and its Supplementary Material.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the members of the UCCRN City CSA Guidance Group for their ongoing support in the development and outreach of this initiative: Aliyu Salisu Barau (Bayero University Kano), Catherine Brinkley (UC Davis), Anna De Boeck (VVSG), Maria Falaleeva (Covenant of Mayors East), Nicolas Francart (CONCITO), Julie Greenwalt (Cities Alliance), Benjamin Jance (GCOM), Andrew Irvin (University of Melbourne), Amy Kirbyshire (C40), Supriya Krishnan (Geospatial World), Gaby Langendijk (Deltares), David Miller (C40), Chiara Morfeo (C40), Leila Niamir (IIASA), Barbara Norman (University of Canberra), Minal Pathak (Ahmedabad University), Mousa Pazhuhan (Tehran Municipality), Kara Reeve (USAID), Debra Roberts (eThekwini Municipality), Seth Schultz (Resilience Rising), and Dana Thompson (Columbia University). At CIESIN, we thank Alex de Sherbinin of CIESIN for his support of the City CSA, and George Verghese and Yasmine Daouk for their continuing work on system development of the prototype. We thank our colleagues at the IPCC, Winston Chow, Bart van den Hurk, Sherine El-Wattar, and Azra Alikadic for their valuable support. Special thanks as well to our collaborators at Hunter College, Geoffrey Fouad, Shipeng Sun, and Peter Marcotullio, for their foundational early work on the database and metadata framework, and to UCCRN Case Study Atlas intern Tatianna Sitounis for her general support. This work has been supported by NASA WBS: 348016.05.04.01.01.
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C.R. and W.S. wrote the main manuscript text and supervised the entire writing process. G.C.D.R. contributed to the Case Study Development Process and Discussion sections. X.X. prepared Figures 2 and 3, and contributed to the City Case Study Atlas Structure section. M.L. and N.T. contributed to the Introduction and Potential User Communities sections. S.S.K., J.B., and M.D. contributed to the entire manuscript text. J.B. developed Figure 1 and contributed to the Methods and Discussion sections. E.F. contributed to the Methods and Discussion sections and prepared Tables 4 and 5. D.B. and N.P. contributed to the City Case Study Atlas Structure section. All authors have read and approved the manuscript.
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Rosenzweig, C., Solecki, W., Friedman, E. et al. Building and using the evidence base for urban climate action: the UCCRN City Solutions Case Study Atlas. npj Urban Sustain (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-026-00342-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-026-00342-z
