Defining urban impact: Embedding data and evidence use in climate-responsive urban development

Urban development projects often face the challenge of unmeasured impacts on urban communities, which sustains the high financial risks associated with large-scale urban investments. Leveraging data is key to de-risking urban development by enabling impact measurement and informing more effective planning. 

Partnerships between city governments and research and evidence-focused institutions can help bridge the gap between urban policy, implementation, and rigorous evaluation.  This is precisely where the role of learning and evaluation partners like J-PAL’s Hub of Advanced Policy Innovation for the Environment (HAPIE) in Egypt becomes essential. 

HAPIE, part of J-PAL’s global network of Air and Water Labs in collaboration with Community Jameel, holds a distinctive position as a learning partner, positioned as the government’s learning “arm” in extension to the Egypt Impact Lab. HAPIE helps city institutions integrate evaluation, data-driven decision-making, and continuous learning directly into policymaking and project design processes. 

Urbanization and climate change 

In Egypt, cities are increasingly exposed to varying levels of climate hazards, including flooding, rising temperatures, prolonged heat stress, and air pollution. Across the MENA region, cities account for approximately 78 percent of countries' energy consumption and contribute to more than 60 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. 

Urban transportation is a major driver of these emissions. Road transport in Egypt accounts for 23 percent of total CO₂ emissions, with a high dependence on private vehicles, taxis, and microbuses. Expanding mass transit systems has already prevented thousands of tons of CO₂ emissions annually and holds significant potential to further reduce air pollution, given the scale, integration, and accessibility of Egypt’s transit networks. As a result, urban spending is essential to scale environmentally friendly solutions and advance sustainable urbanization.

However, compared to other development investments, urban projects typically require greater capital, largely due to the scale of their infrastructure. The global infrastructure financing gap is estimated to be US$15 trillion annually. Their scale and complexity place them at the center of national development agendas, demanding large financial commitments. Thus, de-risking such investments by demonstrating high impact becomes critical.

Policymakers and donors increasingly seek evidence that urban projects deliver value, given their high capital costs. However, integrating rigorous impact evaluations into these projects can be difficult when project budgets are stretched and implementation timelines are set. As a result, the real impact of urban investments on beneficiaries' wellbeing, mobility, safety, economic opportunities, and overall quality of life often remains unmeasured and barely understood. 

A fundamental question at the intersection of urban planning and social development persists: How can we rigorously measure the impact of large urban planning investments?

Evidence-based solutions are essential for navigating this complexity by equipping city planners and policymakers with accurate, timely insights to inform decision-making. By leveraging environmental, socioeconomic, and administrative data, cities can identify patterns and risks, enabling more effective adaptation and mitigation strategies. 

Positioning urban programs for impact

HAPIE is establishing an urban research and policy portfolio, deploying rigorous methods of data use and integrating impact evaluations in program design. Following HAPIE’s participation in the World Urban Forum 12 in Cairo, we engaged with UN-Habitat as the government’s development advisory for urban settlements. Our partnership aims to support development efforts under the Ministry of Local Development and local governorates. 

Across its portfolio, UN-Habitat supports cities in integrating climate considerations, advancing inclusive and people-centered development, while also leading initiatives to embed learning, impact assessment, and adaptive management into urban programs from the outset. In recent years, they have increasingly emphasized results-based programming, bankable projects, evidence-informed policymaking, and the use of data to guide urban interventions. This includes supporting cities in developing their urban indicators through the global urban monitoring framework, a framework that ensures integrating urban indices and the disaggregation of data in city planning.

Building on a capacity-building training for government officials that introduced J-PAL’s evaluation methodology and promoted evidence use, HAPIE and UN-Habitat subsequently convened a technical roundtable in September 2025 to examine how climate data can be leveraged more effectively in urban planning to maximize program impact.

The roundtable brought together government, development, and private-sector stakeholders to inform urban development programs, aligning climate and development efforts and incorporating impact evaluations and data use. 

A few key insights emerged from this roundtable: 

1. Accessibility: Data accessibility remains a core challenge, as relevant datasets are dispersed across multiple entities.
2. Untapped urban data sets: While urban planners rely heavily on geospatial data to plan and monitor interventions, there is a clear opportunity to better integrate quantitative and statistical data at the urban-climate nexus.
3. Strengthening the life cycle of decision-making in urban contexts: Clearly defining policy questions upfront can ensure data collection and analysis are designed to generate actionable insights.

Defining impact in urban projects and integrating data use 

To measure impact in the urban context, data use is particularly relevant and informative given the scale and complexity of these interventions. Leveraging existing data can enable impact analysis that would otherwise be prohibitively costly, time-intensive, and operationally challenging if pursued through primary data collection alone.

Urban data encompasses administrative and institutional data, survey and household data, geospatial and remote-sensing data, sensor and environmental data, and citizen-generated data. Integrating these diverse data sources enables a more comprehensive measurement of the complex impact of urban interventions. 

While HAPIE is still growing its urban project portfolio, we can look to external examples of leveraging different sources of administrative data to evaluate impact. In Jakarta a study was conducted to inform implementation possibilities of a large-scale urban project, titled “Optimal public transportation networks: Evidence from the world’s largest bus rapid transit system in Jakarta.” 

The study examines the impact of the BRT network expansion between 2016-2020, by estimating the optimal network design. Researchers analyzed riders’ travel and waiting time, commuting flows, and assessing the weight of each of these elements on ridership. 

The study used three types of administrative data; a) ridership data, captured electronically through transport smart cards, b) trip flows, using smartphone location data, acquired through a private data provider, and c) bus locations, tracked through existing bus routes and GPS locations for each bus. The researchers used these data sets to estimate a ridership model that incorporates commuter preferences for travel and wait times, to estimate alternative configurations, in reference to the existing network, to identify the optimal expansion plan for the network. 

This example shows how a researcher-policy partnership can lead to real insights for city decision-makers, and demonstrates the potential for large-scale impact.

Design for impact: Plan ahead

Positioning urban programs for impact begins at the start of project planning. When impact measurement is embedded from the outset, projects are better equipped to avoid underestimating or overstating their effects and to generate credible evidence on how interventions influence residents' and communities' lives.

Partnering with learning and evaluation partners such as HAPIE can support this shift toward designing for impact. HAPIE works alongside partners from the early design phase to ensure interventions are positioned for impact,  through structured partnership development, tailored capacity-building and training programs, and the strategic use of administrative data and analysis to inform project design and expansion. 

Furthermore, HAPIE offers competitive funding for impact assessments through our own requests for proposals, helping partners better understand the impact of their interventions and the cost-effectiveness of their implementation mechanisms. As such, urban investments and city planning discourses can be reoriented toward delivering measurable, evidence-driven developmental impact.