Our new study, “Unveiling patterns in the quality and consistency of climate adaptation plans of the Global Covenant of Mayors”, has just been published in npj Urban Sustainability (Springer Nature). It investigates whether urban adaptation plans have truly improved in quality.
The paper presents a robust evaluation frmamework, the ADAQA-GCoM (ADAptation plan Quality Assessment Tool for the Global Covenant of Mayors), which is designed to assess the quality of climate adaptation plans.
This methodology was applied to a large sample of 2,205 urban adaptation plans provided by the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy distributed across 24 European Union countries and 11 others worldwide, including: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mexico, Norway, the Republic of Moldova, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.
You can read the article here: Pietrapertosa, D. Reckien, A. Treville, V. Viguié, M Salvia, L. Santopietro, A. Buzási, K. Rižnar, D. Geneletti, B. Ioannou, P. Eckersley, S. Grafakos, S. De Gregorio Hurtado, A. Krook-Riekkola, A. M. Foley, H. Orru, P. Fokaides, P. Bertoldi, M. Szalmane Csete, O. Heidrich, E. Feliu. Unveiling patterns in the quality and consistency of climate adaptation plans of the Global Covenant of Mayors. npj Urban Sustain (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-026-00390-5