Cities on a Finite Planet

Towards transformative responses to climate change

Sheridan Bartlett, David Satterthwaite

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317291961
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Cities on a Finite Planet: Transformative responses to climate change shows how cities can combine high quality living conditions, resilience to climate change, disaster risk reduction and contributions to mitigation/low carbon development. It also covers the current and potential contribution of cities to avoiding dangerous climate change and is the first book with an in-depth coverage of how cities and their governments, citizens and civil society organizations can combine these different agendas, based on careful city-level analyses.

The foundation for the book is detailed city case studies on Bangalore, Bangkok, Dar es Salaam, Durban, London, Manizales, Mexico City, New York and Rosario. Each of these was led by authors who contributed to the IPCC's Fifth Assessment and are thus acknowledged as among the world's top specialists in this field.

This book highlights where there is innovation and progress in cities and how this was achieved. Also where there is little progress and no action and where there is no capacity to act. It also assesses the extent to which cities can address the Sustainable Development Goals within commitments to also dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In this, it highlights how much progress on these different agendas depends on local governments and their capacities to work with their low-income populations.

1

URBANIZATION, DEVELOPMENT AND THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS

David Satterthwaite and Sheridan Bartlett

Introduction

Cities have always been important for their concentration of people, investment and ideas. At their best they are centres of vitality, diversity and aspiration; also places where the ideal of the common good can be most fully realized. In the absence of effective governance, they can, of course, also be places where the common good is most dramatically violated, locally and globally. The dominant processes that drive cities’ economic success, especially investments in new or expanding businesses, do not of themselves produce healthy or sustainable or inclusive cities. Nor do they produce cities adapted to climate change, or cities that are keeping their greenhouse gas emissions low.

Climate change presents critical new governance challenges to achieving the common good, but also perhaps new opportunities to consider the kinds of fundamental transformation that could address the impacts of climate change along with other inequities.

What happens in cities and other urban centres in the next few decades will be the defining influence on whether or not dangerous climate change is avoided. While many urban centres have high levels of greenhouse gas emissions, it is also in urban centres that much potential for reducing such emissions is concentrated. There are so many examples of cities with ambitious targets for emissions reduction (Seto, Dhakal et al. 2014), along with particular cities that have achieved a great deal in reducing emissions. But for this to happen on the scale that is needed to avoid dangerous climate change, national governments will have to commit to ambitious and equitable global agreements and then actually follow through by delivering the promised emissions reductions as well as reductions in other drivers of climate change. This will require buy in from local governments and, in some nations, buy in from national government to what city governments have done or are doing.

Even with this national support for mitigation, however, most urban centres will also require very substantial investments in adaptation for the climate change impacts they can expect. This is even the case if global agreement is reached on the needed emissions reduction to stop global warming. These impacts will include more, or more intense, extreme weather events, sea level rise and, for many, such challenges as freshwater resource constraints and drought. A particular concern is the time-lag between emissions reduction and the slowing and then halting of sea-level rise. There are also worries about whether the current targets for emissions reduction will keep sea-level rise to levels that can be adapted to.

Also of great concern is the fact that the world’s cities need to deal with the climate change challenges at a time of global environmental crisis. Scientists have identified and quantified nine planetary boundaries within which humanity can continue to develop and ensure well-being for all. Crossing these boundaries could generate abrupt or irreversible environmental changes. Four of the nine planetary boundaries have already been crossed: climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change and altered biogeochemical cycles (phosphorus and nitrogen) (Steffen et al. 2015). This means that climate change is not the only urgent (local and global) environmental issue and that cities will increasingly be called upon to integrate responses to climate changes with other global environmental change agendas such as the loss of biodiversity.

Municipal, city and metropolitan governments around the world already face the challenges of their conventional development agenda, which includes human development and poverty reduction. To this must now be added three others: climate change adaptation, climate change mitigation (especially the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions) and the reworking of disaster risk reduction both to make it more effective and to include within it the necessary attention to new or enhanced risks from climate change. This requires changes to policies, plans, regulatory frameworks and budgets. This is one of the key messages from the 5th Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Yet climate change adaptation and mitigation, and often even disaster response, fall outside the realm of local government roles and responsibilities. Even if this changes, so many city and municipal governments have little or no capacity to act on these added responsibilities. Most cannot even meet the long-standing challenge of ensuring provision of basic infrastructure and services to most of their inhabitants. The scale of their failure on this front can be seen in the one billion urban dwellers who live in informal settlements, who lack provision for risk-reducing infrastructure and basic services, and whose homes and livelihoods are often those most at risk from climate change impacts.

It seems patently unfair to add these new responsibilities for urban centres in low- and middle-income nations. Most have little or no investment capacity (UCLG 2014, Cabannes 2015). The increasing risks and uncertainties they have to respond to have been driven mostly by wealthier nations and people. Yet the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is so urgent that even cities with very low per capita emissions are being asked to contribute. For most cities, these added burdens will require transformational change to their very underpinnings – their economies, buildings, infrastructure and services, consumption patterns and land-use management – to serve both adaptation and mitigation. Effective action on the part of urban governments will also require support from politicians and political parties, citizens and civil society organizations – and at least the acquiescence of private sector interests. Given that almost all the growth in the world’s population is expected to take place in urban areas in what are currently low- and middle-income nations (United Nations 2014), there is the additional issue of meeting the needs of another two billion urban dwellers without overstretching local resources and damaging local eco-systems, all while responding to the concerns raised by climate change.

The core of this book consists of case studies of nine cities, and how they are managing to add climate change adaptation and mitigation to their other agendas. The reasons for choosing these nine cities are explained in more detail in the preface. They were chosen in part to have at least one city from each of the world’s regions, and in part because the IPCC 5th Assessment chapter team on urban adaptation that decided to prepare this book knew these cities and worked in them. Most of these nine cities have seen little or no support from national government or international agencies for any of their actions and investments in their more routine agendas, let alone climate change adaptation and mitigation. The steps they have taken – or not taken – provide some practical evidence of what cities and their governments and people are able to do on their own, and how far greater national and global attention could go to enhance their efforts.

Box 1.1 Preventing dangerous climate change

The ultimate objective of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that was signed at the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro by more than 150 countries and the European Community is the “stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. At present, the goal of the UNFCCC is to get international agreement among all countries to stabilize global temperatures below 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, although there are still considerable risks even if this is achieved and “the precise levels of climate change sufficient to trigger abrupt and irreversible change remain uncertain” (IPCC 2014 page 13).

To prevent dangerous climate change, the UNFCCC has adopted the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” which is intended to recognize the need for all countries to act to address climate change, while accepting their different contributions to causing it and different levels of responsibility for responding. This approach could also be used as a guiding principle for considering the role of city and local governments in responding to climate change.

Growing interest in urbanization but not in urban governance

When the United Nations announced in 2008 that more than half the world’s population lived in urban centres, this helped to generate more attention to urban issues from governments and some international agencies. Now, according to the UN’s latest datasets, 55 per cent of the world’s population lives in urban areas (United Nations 2014). These areas contain most of the world’s economy, private investment and innovation. They also house most of the world’s high-consumers whose consumption patterns underlie so much anthropogenic climate change. They are also home to an ever-growing proportion of the world’s poor. A perhaps surprising and influential ally in demanding more attention to urban development, poverty and climate change is Pope Francis. This can be seen in his 2015 encyclical entitled “Care for our Common Home” which discusses in detail the common good – and climate as a common good.¹ His references to the planet as “our common home” and his discussion of “the common good” in his speech to the United Nations in September 2015 also resonate strongly with the objectives of this book.

But the increased interest in urban issues on the part of most national governments and international agencies has little to do with measures to ensure the common good. It is primarily focused on the key role that cities have in economic growth. It usually involves little interest in poverty reduction other than the hope that economic growth will help. This lack of interest is reflected in a global literature on development priorities that greatly underplays the scale and depth of poverty in urban areas (Mitlin and Satterthwaite 2013). There is also too little interest among national governments and international agencies in disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and mitigation in cities.

Definitions of urban

There is no international agreement as to the definition of a city, so despite the UN figures, it is not possible to specify exactly what proportion of the world’s population lives in cities. All cities may be urban centres, but there are also many urban centres with only a few thousand (and in some countries a few hundred) inhabitants, which lack the size, economic importance or government administrative rank to be considered cities. If we accept that cities are distinguished from urban centres based on these characteristics, what are the appropriate thresholds – how large a population, what indicator of economic importance, what administrative rank?

The United Nations Population Division has figures for all cities with over 300,000 inhabitants. If we take this as our definition for cities, then 57 per cent of the world’s urban population and 31 per cent of its total population live in cities in 2015 (see Table 1.1).

TABLE 1.1 Distribution of the world’s large city population in different population size categories in 2015

Population	Number of urban centres	Population (million)	Percent of global urban population
Under 300,000	100,000? (estimated number)	1,710.5	43.2
300,000–499,999	653	250.4	6.3
500,000–999,999	538	371.0	9.4
1–1.99 million	269	367.6	9.3
2–4.99 million	159	479.6	12.1
5–9.99 million	44	306.9	7.8
10–20 million	21	280.1	7.1
20+ million	8	191.2	4.8

NB: The total urban population in 2015 was 3,957.3 million. Interpret this table with caution – and note the differences in the range of city populations in the columns. Based on figures in United Nations (2014).

But many urban centres that are considered to be cities have less than 300,000 inhabitants. These include many long-established cities that had great importance historically but that have not had rapidly growing populations or economies for many decades.

The definition of “urban areas” also varies a lot between countries. Within most nations, there are settlements that are unambiguously rural, and a range of settlements that are unambiguously urban. But there are also settlements that could be considered either large villages (and thus rural) or small urban centres (and thus urban). Then there are also the rural populations that live within city boundaries – this is especially common for cities with boundaries that encompass large areas beyond the built up area, as in Bangkok Metropolitan Area (see Chapter 4) or Durban (see Chapter 6). It is also common for urban populations to live in districts classified as rural – for instance, as a city’s population spreads beyond the city boundary into a neighbouring (rural) area. In many cities, large numbers of “rural” dwellers a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• List of acronyms
• 1 Urbanization, development and the Sustainable Development Goals
• 2 Understanding risk in the context of urban development: definitions, concepts and pathways
• 3 Bangalore, India
• 4 Bangkok, Thailand
• 5 Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
• 6 Durban, South Africa
• 7 London, United Kingdom
• 8 Manizales, Colombia
• 9 Mexico City, Mexico
• 10 New York, USA
• 11 Rosario, Argentina
• 12 Cross-city analysis
• 13 Conclusions on ways forward
• Postscript
• Index