How More Equal Cities Can Be Climate and Development Solutions

Cities are places of opportunity — and inequality. They are where more than half the world's population will experience the impacts of climate change. They're also part of the solution.

This podcast highlights WRI's major new World Resources Report, Towards a More Equal City, which compiles six years of research on modern urban challenges through an equity lens. The three guests are all co-authors of the synthesis report, Seven Transformations for More Equitable and Sustainable Cities.

Read and download the report

Ani Dasgupta, CEO and President, WRI

“For people, for climate and for innovation you absolutely want to focus on cities, because a lot of the problems we have to solve — for climate, for development, for poverty — are collective action problems. Society must come together and solve them: governments, civil society, businesses. And cities are a fantastic incubator for solutions.”

Anjali Mahendra, Director of Global Research, WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities

“The parts of the world where we’re going to be seeing this rapid urban growth, a large part of it is informal. There are informal settlements. You have informal labor; the number goes up to 80-90% in countries like India and Kenya where people are working in insecure jobs with unreliable and irregular incomes. And then you have informality in the way urban services are delivered. You have a whole ecosystem of informal actors delivering water, running minibuses for transportation, delivering sanitation services”

Robin King, Director of Knowledge Capture and Collaboration, WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities

“If you’re talking about informal workers in the solid waste management space, they’re helping on multiple fronts. They help keep the city cleaner, so it looks better, and it meets the needs for the folks who have garbage accumulating. The recyclers help for the circular economy, ensuring that refuse that can be reused in some way get to folks who can reuse them.”