Leveraging Co-Creation for City-Level Climate Action and Health Co-Benefits: Policy Lessons from CitiES 2030
Cities are at the forefront of interconnected challenges including climate change, public health, economic pressures, social inequalities, and demographic change, where traditional top-down approaches and technical capacity alone are insufficient. Drawing on the Wellcome Trust-funded Pathfinder Initiative (2020–2026), an international collaboration focused on integrating health into urban climate mitigation, this policy brief examines the citiES 2030 platform as a case study in evidence-informed co-creation for urban climate governance. It identifies practical lessons for designing and implementing effective co-creation processes and offers policy recommendations to strengthen collaboration among cities, researchers, policymakers, and other stakeholders.
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Cities are at the forefront of addressing interconnected challenges - including climate change, public health, economic pressures, social inequalities, and demographic change - as they are places where these challenges converge and where many solutions can be implemented. These challenges cannot be effectively tackled through traditional top-down decision-making or technical capacity alone.
The Pathfinder Initiative (2020–2026) — a Wellcome Trust-funded international collaboration focused on integrating health into urban climate mitigation — used the citiES 2030 platform as a case study to explore how evidence-informed co-creation can support urban climate governance. Drawing on this experience, this policy brief identifies practical lessons on designing and implementing co-creation processes and highlights policy recommendations for strengthening collaboration between cities, researchers, policymakers, and other interest-holders.