REINVENTING THE CITY

OUR CITIES HOLD THE KEY TO GLOBAL ECOLOGICAL SUSTAINABILITY

          They are the source of more than 70 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions, and depending on how we develop and manage our urban infrastructures during the next three decades. To achieve the latter result, the US$350 trillion to be spent on urban infrastructure and usage over the next 30 years will have to be directed towards low to zero carbon emissions, particularly in the world’s small. There are three prerequisites for this effort:

• Cities must adopt

• Innovative financing strategies

• The latest technological advances

The Urban Challenge

Our cities the largest contribu-tors to greenhouse gases and climate change.  The world’s urban centres already account for more than 70 per cent of CO2 emissions. In the next three decades, the global population will continue to grow and become ever more urban. This huge expenditure either can cause the ecological impact of our cities to become even more pronounced or can be a tremendous opportunity to reduce that impact. Cities around the world in developed and developing nations need to tackle climate change directly.

Business as Usual Is a Prescription for Failure

There is a growing consensus that the average global temperature must not rise more than 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels if we are to avoid dangerous climate change. To have a reasonable chance (better than 50 per cent) of forestalling such a rise, cumulative global carbon emissions must be limited to 870 gigatons of CO2 equivalent (GtCO2-eq) between 2009 and 2100. The economic cost of climate control also represents a major challenge. The Copenhagen Accord sought to address this issue by establishing the Copenhagen Green Climate Fund, which will provide $100 billion annually to help developing countries mitigate carbon emissions and adapt to climate change by 2020. Our analysis shows that global urban infrastructure and usage expenditures in dwelling and transportation for the next three decades will exceed $350 trillion. In order to control emissions and meet the economic and public health challenges of urban growth.

Urbanization Trends

The ecological footprint created by these two trends is currently distributed unevenly among regions. For example, the ecological footprint of the average Tanzanian or Indian is approximately a quarter of the ecological footprint of a European and a ninth of that of an American. Cities are already the source of more than 70 per cent of global CO2 emissions, and they will account for an ever-higher percentage in the coming years, as more and more people reside in and move to cities in search of more prosperous lifestyles.

Focusing on Small Cities

The bulk of urban population growth will not occur in well-known and mature megacities like Beijing, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Mumbai. By 2020, its population is expected to exceed 500,000.

They generally follow predictable patterns in the mix of expenditures and emissions related to infrastructure development and usage. During the early stages of city development, the bulk of expenditures and emissions stems from construction of buildings, public transportation, and utility infrastructure, such as energy and water. As the maturation process continues, ongoing energy usage increases as the city grows in extent (and, not entirely coincidentally, in wealth) until the bulk of expenditures and emissions comes from the use of existing infrastructure. The fact that growth is occurring fastest in small cities that are still in the process of developing their infrastructure creates a valuable opportunity to decouple the global urban future from expensive, high-carbon lifestyles.

Focusing on Developing Nations

Energy usage in residential and commercial buildings in some industrial regions, in developing economies will be high overall compared to usage. This suggests that there is a window of opportunity to drive down emissions. Given the rate of urban growth in developing nations and the early stage of their infrastructure development efforts, it is clear that they can offer the highest returns in the quest for urban sustainability, even if they are currently less equipped to deal with the challenge. And given the outsized energy usage of cities in developed nations, it is also clear that developing nations should not adopt their inadequate transportation systems and energy-wasting house and building stock as a norm. Developing nations must be supported in a drive to minimize energy use and undertake a shift to renewable energy sources that will enable low carbon lifestyles for city dwellers. The first step in such an effort should be long term, strategic level, low carbon action plans, supported by a holistic national urban planning approach that enables the integration of large mainstream investment flows rather than a project by project approach on the sidelines of core development strategies and decisions.

The Planning Prerequisite

This decrease occurs due to a shift in the mix of industries from energy intensive manufacturing to the lower energy requirements of service industries. It can also occur because of the natural responses to high population density. The most obvious example of the positive role of urban density is transportation, one of the major components of energy and emissions intensity. Population density also has a significant impact on emissions associated with habitation. Denser land use is highly correlated with denser individual housing units, which in turn lead to lower demands for heating, cooling, and lighting, the principal uses of residential energy in the industrialized world. The net result is that increasing urbanization, industrialization, and wealth not only are inevitable but will generally have a negative ecological impact. Higher population densities may have lower emissions per capita, but their total energy usage is higher. The solution is better planning, with high density as one of the central aspects of that planning. With an integrated approach to urban planning that utilizes modern technology, it is possible to achieve lower carbon emissions from transport and buildings in any city.

The Investment Prerequisite

Nations that are in the later stages of the urban infrastructure life cycle with high carbon infrastructures should give high priority to large scale programs designed to reduce the emissions that have been built into the infrastructures of their cities. They should apply the latest technologies to mitigate carbon emissions from their old stock and also set ambitious and challenging standards for guiding their future investments. Decision makers, especially mayors, in developing countries must also seize the opportunity to allocate their financial resources in a strategic way that frees urbanites from high-cost, high-emission infrastructures.

The Technology Prerequisite

Incremental technological improvements cannot provide the absolute emission reductions needed given the rates at which our cities and consumption levels are growing. The technological solutions that we seek must offer transformational levels of improvement. We need to plan infrastructures and use financial leverage from the enormous investments to create zero carbon infrastructures that feature the intelligent use of renewable energy sources. These will likely include solutions integrating renewables like the electrification of private vehicles, public transportation run on electricity and biogas, and the use of district cooling and heating, LED, and natural lighting in buildings.

The Low-Carbon City Is Already Emerging

As in many cities in developing nations, emissions levels are rising in the Chinese city of Baoding, but unlike with other cities, a share of Baoding’s emissions growth is caused by fuelling its workforce and the machinery it is developing to provide lowcarbon solutions to the rest of the world. Solar photovoltaics, wind power, and energy efficiency industries have been a major source of Bao-ding’s green growth engine for the past five years, and the city is determined to expand further. Nationally recognised as the “Green Electric Valley of China,” Baoding has seen the number of its green energy companies expand from 64 in 2005 to 200 in 2008, and its green revenues have more than quadrupled in the same period, from $700 million to $3.5 billion.