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A study of 274 cities has helped shed light on energy consumption in urban areas and what can be done to make future urbanisation more efficient, the BBC reports.

Globally, cities are best placed to mitigate emissions as urban areas are much more energy intensive than rural areas, say researchers.

Most people now live in urban areas, a trend that is accelerating as the global population continues to grow.

The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The UN estimates that almost four billion people - 53% of the world's population - currently reside in towns or cities. By the middle of this century, that figure is set to grow to 6.3 billion. In 1950, the urban population was under 750 million people.

Writing in their paper, a team of researchers from Germany and the US observed: "The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report shows that urban areas consume between 67% and 76% of global energy and generate about three quarters of global carbon emissions.

"Additionally, to accommodate growing urbanising populations and economies, urban areas and their built environment are projected to more than triple between 2000 and 2030."

The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, published in 2014, suggested that "the greatest potential for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions may lie in rapidly developing cities in industrialising countries."

The team found that the mitigation potential of urban areas on a global scale was "insufficiently understood,” making it difficult to quantify what energy savings could be made through more effective planning and development.

"I think one of the central problems is that every city tends to view climate change and energy consumption as their own local problem," suggested co-author Felix Creutzig from the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, Berlin.

"On the local level, it has been understood but at a global level it is different."

In their study, the team analysed a dataset from 274 cities from 60 countries, including all of the world's 21 megacities (urban areas with more than 10 million inhabitants).

The dataset allowed the researchers to identify different profiles of energy use by cities, which could then shape bespoke climate mitigation policies for urban areas that fitted a particular energy-use profile.