About the author: Professor Debra Roberts is an Honorary Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (School of Life Sciences) in South Africa and holds the Professor Willem Schermerhorn Chair in Open Science from a Majority World Perspective at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. She headed the Sustainable and Resilient City Initiatives Unit and Environmental Planning and Climate Protection Department in eThekwini Municipality (Durban, South Africa) between 1994 and 2024. Professor Roberts was elected as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Co-Chair of Working Group II for the sixth assessment cycle and is a Co-ordinating Lead Author for the IPCC’s upcoming Special Report on Climate Change and Cities in the seventh assessment cycle.
Civil Society
In the Context of Climate Overshoot, ‘Cities Are the Crucible and Fire That Drive the Change We Need, and That Change Will be Realized Through Housing,’ Says IPCC Coordinating Lead Author
Held at UN-Habitat headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya, from June 21–24, the 2026 Innovate4Cities Conference (I4C26) brought together city leaders, researchers, policymakers, civil society organizations and community representatives from around the world to discuss practical solutions […]