How cities are built is a key driver of climate outcomes. While attention often focuses on energy policy and environmental regulation, some of the most consequential decisions are made through spatial planning: where cities grow, how they are designed, and what systems connect them. Urban form, once established, is difficult to reverse, shaping energy demand, water consumption, and thermal exposure for decades. 

In Saudi Arabia, where urban expansion and infrastructure investment are advancing rapidly, this creates a time-bound opportunity to influence how growth translates into long-term resilience. 

Approximately 86 percent of the Kingdom’s population now lives in urban areas, with almost 70 percent in major metropolitan regions: Riyadh, Jeddah, and the Eastern Province (United Nations World Urbanization Prospects, 2025). This transition has enabled economic expansion and improved access to services. At the same time, it is reshaping demand across energy, water, and infrastructure systems, while increasing exposure to climate risks. 

These pressures are set to intensify further. Temperatures are rising by approximately 0.6°C per decade, with warming projected to reach around 2°C by mid-century. Extreme heat is expected to affect a growing share of the population for extended periods each year. The residential sector accounts for nearly half of electricity use in the Kingdom, largely driven by cooling demand, while water systems are under increasing pressure, and urban expansion patterns continue to reinforce high resource intensity. These are not projections to be managed at some future date. They are structural conditions already shaping how cities perform and how people live within them. 

To date, the typical response has been incremental: retrofit buildings, improve efficiency, harden infrastructure against specific hazards. This approach, while necessary, treats climate risk as a consequence to be managed after the fact. But urban development patterns, once embedded, are costly and complex to retrofit. This creates a narrowing window to restructure the decisions that generate vulnerability in the first place, rather than absorbing their effects. 

Globally, governments are increasingly turning to National Urban Policies as a mechanism to respond to this challenge. More than 80 percent of countries now have one in place or under development (UN-Habitat, Global State of National Urban Policy 2024) because governments have recognised that climate, economic, and social outcomes cannot be achieved through sectoral interventions alone. At their most effective, these frameworks reshape how decisions are made and realign the systems that drive development by integrating land use, infrastructure investment, and fiscal priorities across institutions. In practice, this includes directing growth toward more compact urban forms, integrating climate risk and vulnerability into land-use change, and ensuring that regional and local plans reinforce national objectives.  

In Saudi Arabia, the development of a National Urban Policy reflects a shift toward this model by developing a framework designed not to plan around climate risk, but to eliminate or mitigate the urban conditions that generate it. It responds to identified gaps in coordination and implementation by establishing a unified framework for urban development — one in which climate considerations are embedded from the outset as a core parameter rather than a downstream constraint. 

The Ministry of Municipalities and Housing is advancing this transition, in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Human Settlements Programme through the Spatial Planning Reform and Visual Appeal Program. The focus extends beyond policy design to implementation, including stakeholder engagement, institutional strengthening, and the development of planning frameworks that can guide decision-making across levels of government, ensuring that policy translates into how cities actually grow.  

In effect, this is anticipatory planning: structuring spatial systems to reduce risk and vulnerability before they materialise, rather than responding once impacts have already occurred. In practice, this plays out across multiple domains. Urban form and fabric, including the housing typologies and settlement patterns that determine how heat is absorbed and how much energy homes require, can moderate energy demand and thermal exposure. Mobility networks can reduce emissions while improving accessibility. Land use and infrastructure planning, when integrated with environmental and climate considerations, can manage water and resource constraints more effectively while addressing the root causes of vulnerability rather than its symptoms.