For best experience please turn on javascript and use a modern browser!
You are using a browser that is no longer supported by Microsoft. Please upgrade your browser. The site may not present itself correctly if you continue browsing.
Cities shape the climate but elude climate science. This workshop reclaims them as rightful objects of inquiry, inviting a methodological reckoning toward modeling urbanity with the rigor once reserved for ice and ocean.
Event details of Towards an IPCC-chapter on Urban Climate Systems
Date
8 July 2025
Time
13:30 -17:30
Room
Sweelinck Room

Cities, engines of the Anthropocene, remain oddly peripheral in climate science—treated as boundary conditions or emission zones, not as dynamic systems with internal feedbacks like glaciers or oceans. This workshop challenges that blind spot. Convened as a methodological and epistemological inquiry, it asks: What would it mean to model a specific city—and the global ensemble of cities—as primary components of the climate system? By reframing cities as legitimate objects of climate inquiry, equivalent in ontological status to cryospheres or ocean currents, we aim to lay groundwork for an eventual IPCC chapter on urban climate systems. Through focused working sessions, we explore the scientific, modeling, and policy questions this shift demands.

Daniel Hogendoorn

About the organiser

Daniel Hogendoorn is a policy fellow at IAS. He works as a policy practitioner to change the long term urban planning and public investment strategies to get Amsterdam within planetary boundaries through different sustainability transitions (energy transition, climate adaptation, circular economy, nature positive city, and increasingly sustainable finance).

Programme

13:30 Arrival and Welcome: Coffee, tea, and opening remarks
13:45 Opening Talk: Putting the Polis back into Policy
14:15 Working Session I: Modeling the Specific City
15:15 Short Break: Coffee and conversation
15:30 Working Session II: Modeling the Urban Ensemble
16:30 Reflections
17:00 Close & Drinks