To be very honest, we’re struggling with a clear thesis in terms of imagining what needles might be moved. Of course, there’s a lot of incremental stuff, and the usual and much needed focus on improving efficiencies, governance capacities, water management, waste management, non motorized and public transport prioritization, green-blue space, flood mapping, heat and climate action plans, etc - and many of these are part of the solution to adpatation etc directly.
But a few questions (from a climate/ecology/biodiversity lens) that have stubbornly remained unanswered through all the great work:
- How does it all start to come together? Multiple individual efforts on multiple plans can not only become inefficient, but in the material and energy sense, also counter productive. Larger budgets, goals on each looked at in a separate silo - these can expand the use of cement, steel, the energy expended on these, and very often, paved areas.
- The huge focus on better service delivery coupled with an imagination of the city rooted in older methods, and uniform across different types and sizes of the city could lead to similar outcomes. E.g. has Delhi’s vast (and unit-efficient) metro network increased overall urban commute and transport distances like crazy?
- What responsibility does/can a city take? Ecologically, economically? Where does this show up, beyond the narrative?
- Who does the city belong and respond do? Does it include the transient, the distant, the non human?
- Are various motivations and consensus showing up in how a city thinks of and measures itself? Say, the scope 2/3 emissions responsibility? The trade-off made in that as Bangalore attempts to take that responsibility through water while also sourcing more fighting gravity?
- Who owns the city and all of the above questions? Each department, each civic org is focused on excelling on a few bits at most, and despite doing a great job when that happens, inadvertently accrues material/energy debt elsewhere?
If you have thoughts, do share. Happy to also get on a call and even try and system-map it deeper on a whiteboard. Really trying to figure out (if there are) key levers that can unlock a different direction in a substantial way, or if this is a tough one overall and we can “only do what we can” 
Hopefully there’s more clarity out there and we’re just unable to spot these key levers and how they add up to substantial shifts wrt climate resilience, adaptation and eventually mitigation, and we’ll learn that through this and 1x1 conversations.