Seizing the Urban Opportunity: A 3-Step Guide for Strengthening Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) 3.0

This guide offers a practical framework to integrate urban priorities into national climate plans (NDCs), ensuring they are more inclusive, grounded and ready to implement where climate action happens – in cities.

Cities are at the center of the climate crisis, yet they remain underrepresented in national climate plans. While urban area cities consume 78% of the world's energy and produce more than 60% of greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, only 27% of NDCs include strong urban content. Financing is another major gap: urban requests for finance, technology and capacity-building are outnumbered by national ones up to 40 to 1. Furthermore, only 40% of NDCs include both urban mitigation and adaptation strategies.

This guide provides policymakers, national climate planners and other stakeholders with a clear path forward. It offers a structured three-step approach to assess current NDCs, prepare and co-design stronger NDCs which reflect the challenges and opportunities of cities.

Co-developed by UN-Habitat and SDU Resilience, with support from over 15 partners organizations, including C40 Cities, ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, the Global Covenant of Mayors (GCoM) and UNDP Climate Promise, this guide builds on Urban Content of NDCs, which became UN-Habitat’s most downloaded publication of 2024 (behind the World Cities Report on Cities and Climate Action), and serves as a timely tool to support governments and stakeholders in designing inclusive, locally grounded and implementation-ready climate plans.