Climate mitigation and climate adaptation are crucial tasks for urban areas and can involve synergies as well as trade-offs. However, few studies have examined how mitigation and adaptation efforts relate to each other in a large number of differently sized cities, and therefore we know little about whether forerunners in mitigation are also leading in adaptation or if cities tend to focus on just one policy field. This article develops an internationally applicable approach to rank cities on climate policy that incorporates multiple indicators related to (1) local commitments on mitigation and adaptation, (2) urban mitigation and adaptation plans and (3) climate adaptation and mitigation ambitions. We apply this method to rank 104 differently sized German cities and identify six clusters: climate policy leaders, climate adaptation leaders, climate mitigation leaders, climate policy followers, climate policy latecomers and climate policy laggards. The article seeks explanations for particular cities’ positions and shows that coping with climate change in a balanced way on a high level depends on structural factors, in particular city size, the pathways of local climate policies since the 1990s and funding programmes for both climate mitigation and adaptation.

减缓气候变化和适应气候是城市地区的关键任务，可能涉及协同作用和权衡。然而，很少有研究在大量不同规模的城市中研究减缓和适应工作如何相互关联，因此我们对减缓的先行者是否也在适应中处于领先地位或城市是否倾向于只关注一个政策领域知之甚少. 本文开发了一种国际适用的方法来根据气候政策对城市进行排名，该方法结合了与 (1) 当地减缓和适应承诺、(2) 城市减缓和适应计划以及 (3) 气候适应和减缓目标相关的多个指标。我们应用这种方法对 104 个不同规模的德国城市进行排名，并确定了六个集群：气候政策领导者、气候适应领导者、气候减缓领导者、气候政策追随者、气候政策后来者和气候政策落后者。文章寻求对特定城市立场的解释，并表明在高水平上以平衡的方式应对气候变化取决于结构性因素，特别是城市规模、自 1990 年代以来地方气候政策的路径以及减缓气候变化的资助计划和适应。