African Cities Show a Synergy Gap Between Climate Adaptation and Mitigation, Study Finds

African cities are doing far more to adapt to climate change than to curb its causes, and the interventions that could deliver both goals at once are lagging behind, according to a systematic review of climate action across twelve of the continent’s urban centres. The study, published in Discover Cities by Carl-Philipp Bodenstein of the University of Vienna and Shuaib Lwasa of the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, coded nearly 1,900 discrete climate actions drawn from 173 publications and reports spanning the years 2010 to 2025. Its central finding is stark: roughly 91 percent of recorded actions were adaptations, only about 15 percent were mitigations, and just 6 percent were genuinely integrated interventions that served both purposes simultaneously.

The researchers worked in cooperation with the University of Manchester’s African Cities Research Consortium, selecting twelve cities chosen to reflect the continent’s diversity in geography, climate, economy, culture, and urbanisation history. The set includes heavily studied metropolises such as Accra, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and Lagos, alongside severely under-researched cities like Bukavu, Freetown, Maiduguri, and Mogadishu. After screening more than 3,100 search results with machine-assisted tools and manual review, the team coded each documented intervention by actor, spatial scale, implementation status, response type, and potential synergies or trade-offs, then contextualised the results against a composite index combining climate exposure, social vulnerability, and infrastructure deficit.

The imbalance between adaptation and mitigation is not accidental, the authors argue, but rooted in the architecture of international climate finance. Mitigation programmes globally receive roughly 30 billion US dollars compared with 16 billion for adaptation and a mere 2.7 billion for integrated strategies. More than half of adaptation programmes, 57 percent, are loan-financed, and disbursement ratios hover around 46 percent. The cost-benefit logic of climate finance privileges measurable emission reductions over the diffuse, context-specific benefits of adaptation, creating what the study calls a paradox: African cities contribute least to global warming, with average per capita emissions of around 2.5 tonnes per year compared with 27 tonnes in cities like Rotterdam, yet the financing system disadvantages precisely those cities for whom adaptation is the urgent imperative.

To quantify where co-beneficial measures might be falling behind, the researchers introduced what they call the Synergy Gap, calculated as the difference between the general implementation rate and the rate at which actions with cross-domain benefits are implemented. Positive values signal that singular interventions are outpacing synergistic ones, a pattern the authors attribute to siloed governance structures that treat adaptation and mitigation as separate policy domains. About 32 percent of all recorded actions carried potential synergies, and the largest share, 51 percent, fell into a category the study labels the NBS-Sequestration Nexus: nature-based solutions such as tree planting, mangrove restoration, and green infrastructure that cool neighbourhoods and buffer floods while also sequestering carbon.

The geography of implementation is strikingly uneven. Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and Lagos consistently show the highest levels of reported climate activity and implementation, while Addis Ababa, Freetown, and Mogadishu sit at the lower end. In Addis Ababa, roughly 90 percent of recorded actions consist of plans and recommendations rather than concrete implementations, despite strong problem awareness among city planners regarding drinking water, sewage, and flooding. Accra, together with Lilongwe, shows the largest Synergy Gap in the dataset, with promising policy frameworks on solid waste, energy, and transport undermined by weak cross-sectoral execution. In contrast, Nairobi, Freetown, and Maiduguri are the only three cities where more synergistic actions are implemented than singular ones, driven mainly by local and multi-actor initiatives.

One of the study’s most consequential findings concerns who actually gets things done. Households and communities achieve higher implementation rates than government-led measures across the twelve cities, and multi-actor collaborations also perform comparatively well. Autonomous actions were overwhelmingly coded at the household and community levels, with half of household actions being behavioural or cultural practices such as savings strategies and improved waste handling. Yet these are the least resourced actors in the climate finance landscape. The authors note that this partly reflects a research bias, since studies tend to document community practices only once they are already observable, while government planning is researched regardless of whether it is ever implemented. Still, the pattern underscores a structural tension: the potentially most effective actors are the least funded.

Informal settlements emerge as both the epicentre of climate vulnerability and a blind spot in the evidence base. Actions targeting informal settlements account for 37 percent of the sample, with the highest shares in Nairobi at 77 percent and Lilongwe at 67 percent, but only 3 percent in Addis Ababa despite its slum population share of around 72 percent. The study devotes considerable attention to the conceptual difficulties of informality, noting that the term is a malleable socio-political construct and that formal and informal sectors are so interpenetrated in many African cities that separating them is, as one cited scholar puts it, ridiculous. Data on informality, the largest dimension of most African cities, are rarely publicly available, and urban indicators often aggregate formal and informal dimensions in ways that obscure intra-urban inequality.

Data scarcity itself emerges as a methodological finding. For Bukavu, Freetown, Maiduguri, and Mogadishu, fewer than ten publications per city exist, and the authors caution that the apparent positions of Bukavu and Maiduguri in their comparative analyses very likely reflect data artefacts rather than actual activity levels. Mogadishu, despite facing among the most urgent climate pressures, remains one of the least researched capital cities in Africa, with minimal solar and wind adoption despite favourable conditions. The authors stress that reported action levels are as much a function of research attention as of actual implementation, an epistemic bias they link to the framing of Southern Urbanism, which rejects applying Euro-American urban theory to cities shaped by colonial and postcolonial dynamics.

Trade-off risks, though less frequent than synergies, cluster in worrying ways. Of 268 potential trade-offs recorded, representing 14 percent of all actions, half relate to social exclusion, followed by potential ecosystem harm at 26 percent. The authors warn that when technical and utilitarian values dominate nature-based interventions, the social and cultural dimensions of human-nature relations central to how African communities experience climate risk are marginalised. Excess rainfall is the most frequently recorded climate stressor across half the cities, associated with nearly 60 percent of preventative adaptation goals, while temperature extremes concentrate in Accra, Addis Ababa, and Dar es Salaam.

The study’s conclusions are deliberately framed as hypotheses rather than definitive rankings, given the exploratory nature of comparing cities with such uneven evidence bases. But its prescriptions are clear: integrated, multi-scalar approaches anchored in better data and dynamic frameworks are essential to align urban climate action with Africa’s heterogeneous urban realities. The authors call for flexible, co-produced typologies that can distinguish settlements appearing similar from above but diverging on the ground, dedicated funding windows for community-government coalitions, and governance reforms that overcome the compartmentalisation of adaptation and mitigation. As the scientific community prepares the IPCC’s forthcoming Special Report on Cities, the message from these twelve African cities is that integration is not simply another box to check, but a precondition for climate action that works.

Subject of Research: Integrated climate change adaptation and mitigation interventions, synergies, and co-benefits in African cities

Article Title: Lessons from integrated climate change adaptation and mitigation interventions for synergies and co-benefits in African cities

Article References: Bodenstein, C.-P., & Lwasa, S. (2026). Lessons from integrated climate change adaptation and mitigation interventions for synergies and co-benefits in African cities. Discover Cities, 3(1), Article 174. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44327-026-00359-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44327-026-00359-0

Keywords: climate adaptation, climate mitigation, African cities, synergy gap, co-benefits, nature-based solutions, informal settlements, urban climate finance, Southern Urbanism, climate governance, urban vulnerability, infrastructure deficit