Cities today navigate a complex mix of pressures, including inequality, rapid growth, fiscal strain, infrastructure gaps, and mounting climate shocks. Climate impacts interact with deeper structural challenges that shape who is most at risk and which solutions can take hold. In this context, climate-readiness initiatives can do more than prepare cities for hazards. This prompts the following question: Under what conditions do adaptation and resilience interventions lead to more fundamental changes in urban systems? This paper examines how they can also create openings into wider forms of urban transformation when they expand, accumulate momentum, and strengthen the conditions that allow change to endure.

Highlights:

  • Cities face compounding pressures, including inequality and affordability challenges, infrastructure strain, and climate risk. Taking action on climate can play a role in addressing them together.
  • Our analysis of five finalists from the 2023–2024 WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities (the “Prize”) shows how climate initiatives can become entry points for broader urban transformations.
  • The initiatives generated wide-ranging benefits across safety, mobility, ecology, public space, community cohesion, and governance, going well beyond climate goals.
  • Climate actions grew in influence through identifiable scaling processes that helped them gain traction, expand into new areas, attract partners, and become part of routine governance and everyday life.
  • We identify how seven types of enabling conditions, which we call “infrastructures,” shaped how initiatives could develop and how they contributed to longer-term systems change.
  • Through the concept of infrastructures of climate readiness, the paper offers six priority actions that cities can take to strengthen climate readiness and guide transformation in practical, grounded ways.