Local governments and urban stakeholders have started to address climate change in the Asia and Pacific region by exploring low carbon development paths and by building up their resilience, including with support from UN-Habitat's Cities and Climate Change Initiative. However, these efforts remain local. The key bottlenecks for a broader urban sector response to climate change are: (i) limited local and national capacities to address climate change challenges, aggravated by limited documentation and dissemination of good practices and regional support; (ii) limited funding for climate change responses, particularly at the local level; and (iii) a combination of a lack of political will (climate change is still seen as a threat well beyond the electoral cycle) and legal and policy frameworks that do not anticipate rapid urban growth nor climate change. Given on-going initiatives that support local capacity development this project focuses primarily on building support capacities of national government agencies addressing urban issues. Using policy review as an entry point and capacity development in support of multilevel governance responses to climate change as key implementation mechanism, this project aims to build an enabling environment for local action as well as the capacities to build on opportunities that are available. Initially five countries will be selected for in-depth support and in a second phase regional roll out will be pursued through policy guideline dissemination and wider capacity development. UN-Habitat will coordinate country and city level advisory and capacity development; UNEP will lead the policy review process and UNESCAP will coordinate regional EGMs and policy meetings.