Climate capacity in medium-sized German cities: (how) do smaller municipalities implement mitigation and adaptation policies?

Eckersley, P ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9048-8529, Otto, A, Haupt, W and Kern, K, 2025. Climate capacity in medium-sized German cities: (how) do smaller municipalities implement mitigation and adaptation policies? npj Climate Action, 4: 62. ISSN 2731-9814

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Abstract

Although research has begun to examine local mitigation and adaptation approaches in parallel, it has tended to focus on leading cities and adopt large-N approaches that focus on published climate plans. We know little about whether smaller local governments are able to address these twin challenges simultaneously, or whether and how they are implementing their planned policies. Drawing on analysis of 194 German cities, supplemented by fieldwork interviews in ten of these municipalities, we find that smaller cities are focusing increasingly on both mitigation and adaptation at the institutional level. However, concerns remain about implementation and the long term development of infrastructure projects. Moreover, there is a risk that our knowledge of local climate policy, much of which is based on climate planning documents, may be distorted because municipalities are incentivised to produce highly ambitious and unrealistic plans, and often rely heavily on external experts to draft these documents.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	npj Climate Action
Creators:	Eckersley, P., Otto, A., Haupt, W. and Kern, K.
Publisher:	Springer
Date:	1 July 2025
Volume:	4
ISSN:	2731-9814
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1038/s44168-025-00259-w DOI 2448393 Other
Rights:	© the author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Divisions:	Schools > Nottingham Business School
Record created by:	Laura Borcherds
Date Added:	05 Jun 2025 07:31
Last Modified:	07 Jul 2025 13:42
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/53692

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