Energy and Climate
Promoting the development and acceleration of affordable, low-carbon solutions for emerging economies

Energy and Climate is a joint initiative of WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities and the World Resources Institute's Climate and Energy programs. We aim to help cities power development with affordable, sustainable electricity; significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and vulnerability to climate change impacts; meet ambitious goals on access to urban opportunities and energy; and drive ambition in both sub-national and national climate commitments. We advocate for the adoption of global and local strategies that reconcile top-down and bottom-up approaches with specific demonstration and pilot projects in targeted countries and cities.

Energy and Climate is an important part of our “Optimize, Electrify, Decarbonize” framework, which encourages cities to focus on three steps to build momentum for climate action and reach a tipping point beyond which zero-carbon infrastructure becomes mainstream.

Our objective is to enable national governments to change national and international frameworks that enable local government actions. We do this by focusing on four key areas:

  1. Developing and diffusing tools, methodologies, and standards to design, plan, fund, and implement low-carbon urban projects and to measure greenhouse gas emissions.
  2. Encouraging national and local actions linking energy and climate by making the case that the low-carbon pathway is feasible and produces benefits for sustainable development.
  3. Shifting and increasing funding for low-carbon urban development internationally and nationally by identifying barriers and strategies to overcome them.
  4. Improving access to low-carbon technology by building national and local capacities to identify and assess barriers preventing technology transfer.

Read more about WRI Ross Center’s energy and climate work on TheCityFix.

Energy and Climate Facts

  1. Urban areas are home to half the world’s population, but generate around 80 percent of global economic output and around 70 percent of global energy use and energy-related greenhouse gas emissions.
  2. By 2030, cities could produce nearly 8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year from buildings and personal vehicle use alone.
  3. Compact, transit-oriented urban development could reduce carbon emissions by between 6 million and 1.9 billion metric tons by 2030 through better land use and energy-efficient transport.
  4. Transitioning to a low-carbon electricity system could increase the capacity of the global financial system by as much as $1.8 trillion between 2015 and 2035.
  5. Policies that improve energy efficiency in urban transport systems could help save as much as $70 trillion in spending on vehicles, fuel, and transport infrastructure between now and 2050.

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