The low-lying schoolyard of Shuang Wen School (P.S. 184M) in New York City’s Chinatown tells a quiet story of transformation. Once an expanse of asphalt, this schoolyard and the surrounding neighborhood were devastated by flooding when Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012, revealing how unprepared both the community and the city were for climate shocks. In the months that followed, the schoolyard was redesigned through the Green Community Schoolyards program replacing asphalt with trees, permeable surfaces and shaded play areas.Nearly a decade later in 2021, when heavy rains and winds from Hurricane Ida overwhelmed parts of the city, the redesigned schoolyard didn’t flood — it absorbed the water instead. The day after the storm, it was like nothing happened. By then, the Green Community Schoolyards program had expanded across dozens of schools, embedding schoolyard redesigns into its broader approach to stormwater management, heat mitigation and neighborhood resilience. This change isn’t just about playground design, but about how the city is rethinking everyday spaces as part of a broader system of climate resilience. The Green Community Schoolyards program in New York City gives students and the community a safe place to gather and play. Photo by WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities. This pattern of systems-level thinking is visible in many projects in cities around the world that have successfully scaled from delivering local benefits to driving urban transformation.Five Cities That Demonstrate Climate Readiness in PracticeCities are on the front lines of climate change, facing rising temperatures, intensifying floods, infrastructure strain and growing inequality, often all at once. Around the world, governments and communities are responding to climate change with innovative initiatives, from restoring rivers and redesigning public spaces to upgrading housing and improving waste management systems.However, while many projects deliver meaningful local benefits, far fewer create the larger systems change needed to address increasingly complex urban challenges through broader programs, policies and strategies to build long-term climate resilience.This raises a critical question for cities everywhere:What separates climate projects that remain pilots from those that scale into broader urban transformation?To better understand how climate action can scale, we analyzed five finalists from the 2023-2024 cycle of the WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities.Drawn from different sectors and contexts around the world, these projects show how climate initiatives can serve as entry points for broader urban transformation at scale:In New York City, schoolyards were transformed into green infrastructure that manages stormwater and reduces heat.In Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, India (formerly Aurangabad), a polluted river was restored through ecological and community-led approaches.In Fortaleza, Brazil, a recycling initiative improved livelihoods, reduced waste and emissions, and supported the growth of citywide bike infrastructure.In Buenos Aires, Argentina, an informal settlement was upgraded with climate-resilient housing and public space.In Oslo, Norway, climate goals were embedded directly into the city’s budgeting process.While these initiatives addressed different challenges, they shared something important in common. Each began as a focused intervention and gradually expanded its influence beyond its original objective. Climate Readiness As a Driver of Urban Transformation: Lessons From the WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities Cycle 2023–2024Read the full report.DownloadIn doing so, these projects improved not only environmental outcomes, but also public space, livelihoods, governance coordination, institutional capacity and community well-being.Our research identified two key ideas that help explain how the cities scaled their projects.First, successful initiatives do not all scale through a uniform process of replication. Instead, they tend to scale in different ways: by building legitimacy and ownership (scaling deep); expanding across sites, districts and sectors (scaling out) becoming embedded within higher level policies, budgets and institutions (scaling up); transferring successful approaches to new cities and jurisdictions (scaling across); and phasing out or redesigning practices and systems that are unsafe, unsustainable or no longer fit for purpose (scaling down).Second, these processes are shaped by what we call climate readiness infrastructures: the governance, financial, social, knowledge, technological, human capacity and physical systems that determine whether initiatives can take root, grow and endure. While these concepts help explain how transformation happens, the experiences of the five cities also point to a more practical question: What can city leaders, practitioners and project teams do differently to increase the likelihood of lasting change?Four priority actions stand out for projects looking to scale early action into broader urban transformation.1) Diagnose Your City’s Starting Position Before Planning to ScaleOne of the most striking findings from the five cities was that there was no single pathway to scaling. While all of the initiatives ultimately expanded their impact, they did so from very different starting points. Some could build on strong government institutions and financing systems, while others first needed to establish public support, partnerships or coordination across institutions. These starting conditions shaped what each initiative needed to prioritize first, and the sequence through which it deepened, spread and embedded over time.Scaling Up, Scaling Out, Scaling Deep: In Oslo, climate action benefited from a city government that already had strong planning and budgeting systems in place. With these institutional foundations already established, the city could first focus on integrating climate goals into routine decision-making. Climate targets became part of annual budget discussions, helping ensure that departments across the city shared responsibility for delivering them. In Oslo, climate targets are integrated into the city’s annual budgeting process, ensuring climate considerations are incorporated across departments and projects ranging from buildings, transport, waste, energy and more. Photo by WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities. Scaling Deep, Scaling Out, Scaling Up: In Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, starting conditions looked very different. With neither broad public support nor established governance structures for restoring the Kham River in place, the initiative first had to build legitimacy around the idea of restoration of the river itself. Project partners needed to build public support for restoring the Kham River. Community cleanups, public events and coalition-building efforts helped residents see the river not as a polluted drain, but as a civic asset worth investing in.Scaling Up, Scaling Deep, Scaling Out: New York City’s Green Community Schoolyards followed yet another path. The city had significant resources and technical expertise, but scaling required connecting capacities that were spread across different agencies, schools and communities. The project therefore focused on standardizing interagency coordination and building support across schools, agencies and communities while demonstrating that schoolyards could serve as both public spaces and climate infrastructure.The lesson for practitioners is simple: Before deciding how to scale, diagnose what your city already has and what it still needs to build. Successful initiatives rarely follow a predetermined blueprint. Instead, they build from the capacities, relationships and institutions already present in a city. Understanding those starting conditions can be just as important as the intervention itself.2) Treat Early Projects as Learning Opportunities for Future Scaling, Not End ProductsMany projects begin as pilots but are too often treated as complete solutions rather than as opportunities to learn, adapt and scale.Across the five cities, interventions did much more than deliver immediate benefits. They scaled deep by helping build trust, generate evidence, attract new partners and create the momentum needed for larger changes to follow.In Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, early river cleanups, public events and community engagement activities helped revive cultural connections to the Kham River. That shift in perception created public support for larger restoration efforts and helped bring together government agencies, technical experts and community groups around a shared vision for the river’s future. Community events along the Kham River helped reconnect residents with the river and build a shared vision for its restoration. Photo by WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities. A similar pattern emerged in New York City. The first Green Community Schoolyards site showed that school grounds could do much more than provide recreational space. By reducing flooding, mitigating heat and creating opportunities for environmental learning, it demonstrated the value of turning everyday spaces into climate infrastructure. As support grew, the initiative expanded to additional schools and became part of the city’s broader resilience strategy.In both cities, the initial projects were valuable not only for what they delivered, but for what they unlocked. By scaling deep, they created the evidence, legitimacy and partnerships needed for larger changes to take root — highlighting the value of early projects as learning opportunities that build momentum and support for future action.3) Enable Scale by Designing Projects That Can Spill Into Other SystemsThe most transformative projects rarely remain confined to a single sector. While many initiatives begin by addressing a specific challenge, their broader impact often comes from their ability to scale by connecting issues that cities typically address in silos.Fortaleza’s Re-Ciclo initiative illustrates this well. What began as an effort to improve waste collection gradually evolved into a platform for addressing a range of interconnected urban challenges. The initiative was incubated within Fortaleza’s municipal innovation lab, whose role is to tackle urban challenges through a systems approach. To address the city’s waste management issue, Re-Ciclo introduced e-tricycles for door-to-door collection while incorporating higher pay and workplace improvements for informal waste workers. By combining waste collection, electric mobility, climate action and economic inclusion, the project demonstrates how addressing interconnected challenges can create opportunities for impact far beyond a project’s original mandate. Catadores (waste pickers) use Re-Ciclo’s e-tricycles to collect recyclables along neighborhood routes before transporting them to an eco-point for sorting and recycling. Photo by WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities. A similar dynamic emerged in Buenos Aires’ Rodrigo Bueno neighborhood. While the project began with upgrading housing and infrastructure, it soon expanded into improvements in public space, environmental restoration, access to services, mobility and social inclusion. Rather than tackling these challenges separately, the initiative recognized that they were deeply interconnected and that progress in one area could reinforce progress in another.Projects that create these kinds of connections often generate more opportunities for scaling than those designed around a single outcome. By working across systems rather than within silos, they can attract a broader coalition of partners, unlock additional sources of funding and create benefits that extend well beyond their original objectives.4) Build the Governance Anchors Necessary for ScaleMany initiatives rely heavily on individual champions, but lasting transformation requires interventions that scale up by instituting governance structures that can outlive them.In Oslo, that anchor was the city’s budget. By integrating climate targets into annual budgeting processes, emissions reduction became part of everyday decision-making across departments, from transport and construction to waste management and energy.In Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, the anchor emerged more gradually. What began as a community-led effort to restore the Kham River evolved into a broader coalition of government agencies, technical experts and civil society organizations. Over time, these partnerships helped establish the Kham as the first seasonal river in India to develop an Urban River Management Plan through the River Cities Alliance, creating a formal framework to guide long-term restoration and management. The plan not only helped sustain progress along the Kham but also created a model for managing seasonal rivers elsewhere in India.Buenos Aires offers a third example. The transformation of Rodrigo Bueno was not limited to upgrading housing and public space. One of the initiative’s earliest achievements was helping secure a law that formally recognized residents’ land and home ownership, providing legal certainty for a community that had long faced the threat of eviction. This created the foundation for subsequent investments, including new street networks, access to city services, formal addresses, and the construction of energy-efficient housing. By embedding these changes within a broader framework for socio-urban integration, the city helped ensure that progress was not dependent on a single project or political administration. The transformation of Rodrigo Bueno in Buenos Aries combined new housing, streets, public spaces and green infrastructure with legal and institutional reforms that integrated the neighborhood into the broader city. Photo by WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities. The specific structures differed, but the lesson was the same: Successful initiatives scale up by relying on systems. The most effective governance anchors were often surprisingly simple: a budget process, an urban river management plan, a formal partnership or a shared protocol. What mattered was not their complexity, but their ability to provide continuity. They were light enough to adapt, but strong enough to steady the work through political, financial and operational uncertainty.From Single Climate Projects to Urban TransformationAcross all four lessons, the projects that scaled were not simply delivering climate outcomes, they were strengthening governance, institutions, relationships and capacities. As a result, despite different scaling pathways, they succeeded in enabling broader change and ultimately, what we refer to as climate readiness.The schoolyard in Manhattan’s Chinatown was never just a schoolyard. It became climate infrastructure, a community asset and part of a broader shift in how New York City approached resilience.That is perhaps the central lesson from these five cities. Urban transformation need not always begin with a citywide strategy. More often, it begins with a single project. The question is whether that project is designed not only to solve today’s problem, but also to build the conditions for tomorrow’s change.Ian French is director of communications and external relations at the Yale School of the Environment’s Hixon Center for Urban Sustainability.