The journal Cities has published the article “Who supports urban climate adaptation? Climate literacy, age and urban context in Polish cities”, co-authored by Associate Professor Katarzyna Sobiech-Grabka of the Institute of Enterprise and Associate Professor Łukasz Kurowski of the Collegium of Management and Finance, SGH Warsaw School of Economics.
Cities is one of the leading international journals in urban studies, published by Elsevier continuously since 1983 and indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index and Scopus. Its Impact Factor stands at 7.0 according to the 2025 Journal Citation Reports, placing it in the first quartile (Q1) in four categories: Development; Sociology and Political Science; Tourism, Leisure and Hospitality Management; and Urban Studies. The journal is rated at 100 points on the Polish Ministry of Science list of scholarly journals.
The study covered more than a thousand residents of 18 Polish cities and examined how climate literacy and urban context relate to readiness for adaptation measures. The authors show that the effect of climate literacy alone on pro-environmental behaviour, once instrumental variable estimation is applied, is weak and statistically unstable. Urban context, measured by a city’s position in the SGH Healthy Cities Index, mattered mainly for transport choices. The strongest and most consistent predictor of adaptive attitudes turned out to be age: residents over 45 reported the highest levels of pro-environmental consumer behaviour and most frequently pointed to the need for changes in urban infrastructure.
The article offers conclusions addressed directly to municipal administration. They concern which adaptation measures residents expect, which groups voice the strongest needs, and why standard public consultation formats fail to capture them. The intended audiences include city authorities, spatial planning units, municipal senior citizens’ councils, and non-governmental organisations working on climate change adaptation.
The CAWI survey was conducted by the Pollster team under the supervision of Ewa Kubica-Ścieszko. The study was financed from the subsidy for the maintenance and development of research capacity of the Collegium of Business Administration (KNoP), SGH Warsaw School of Economics.
Full reference: Cities, vol. 179 (2026), article 107589.
The full text is available free of charge, with no registration required, until 7 November 2026:
Who supports urban climate adaptation? Climate literacy, age and urban context in Polish cities