Climate neutral cities in the landscape of sustainability, climate justice, and decarbonization: a literature review

The definition of carbon neutrality for a city is not merely a quantitative exercise. If keeping the global average temperature rise below 1.5 [°C] is a challenging target, accounting for other dimensions beyond the environmental one, like the social are involved is a real objective still unachieved. This literature review found how much variables like geographic appurtenance, policy frameworks, regulatory asymmetry, data collection and management need a higher degree of standardization and real best practices to follow. Urban planning should consider the impact of emissions mitigation on the social and economic domain starting understand how to quantify crucial issues like climate justice and how to embed these in the decisional process. Given the importance of urban areas as emissions hubs, is reasonably important to understand how and what can contribute to foresee a change and driving it sustainably. New questions concerning energy democratization, climate justice, energy poverty and access to it as a resource can be answered helping decision makers and stakeholders to navigate the process by taking each step with a greater awareness, using good quality data of different sources and related KPIs. • Decarbonization strategies are tightly dependant on policies and geography. • Climate justice is peripheral, tied more to policy themes than social ones. • EVs and net-zero pathways link tech and a fair sustainable transition. • Co-authorship maps show isolated cluster due to geographic asymmetry.