Cities are social, cultural, and political spaces forged from the economic conversion of nature's bounty into specific forms of human development. Differently situated groups of people differently experience these forms. However talented, individuals are refracted through race, class, gender, and other social frames of identity and (dis)empowerment. Yet all are facing the calamitous reality of global climate change. As the ARC3.2 report of the Urban Climate Change Research Network specifically puts it, cities are, in their challenging phrase, “complex social-ecological systems” (UCCRN, 2018, p. 7). Innovative and effective ideas for how political and policy communities at various scales with diverse interests and values can manage these systems relate to at least five areas of particular concern: integrating carbon mitigation with adaption; coordinating disaster risks with climate adaptation; cogenerating and deploying risk information more effectively; advancing trans-local action networks; and, not least, focusing on disadvantaged populations who are particularly vulnerable.

Cities like Seattle are legally bounded places with clear jurisdictions, yet also sinuous, “stringy,” web-like relationships and bundled connections, such as city-regional economies of carbon-using commuters and trans-local ecologies of water flows and energy grids that “stretch” Seattle's urban experience well beyond these legally bounded places (see Figure 1.2). So, too, are the many transnational municipal networks within which Seattle now actively participates, such as C40 Cities and, more recently, the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance, that each seek collective urban action at the global scale. Seattle has not been a passive bystander but a dynamic cocreator of these new spaces.

After Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement in early June 2017, Seattle immediately passed a remarkable resolution to uphold its financial portion of America's national commitments. Seattle directed municipal support for the Green Climate Fund (GCF). “The Seattle resolution appears to be unique in its support for the fund,” Karl Mathiesen (2017) observed soon thereafter: