Reimagining Sustainable Cities

Strategies for Designing Greener, Healthier, More Equitable Communities

Stephen M. Wheeler

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520381209
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Conservation & Protection
• Index: Biological Sciences

A cutting-edge, solutions-oriented analysis of how we can reimagine cities around the world to build sustainable futures. What would it take to make urban places greener, more affordable, more equitable, and healthier for everyone? In recent years, cities have stepped up efforts to address climate and sustainability crises. But progress has not been fast enough or gone deep enough. If communities are to thrive in the future, we need to quickly imagine and implement an entirely new approach to urban development: one that is centered on equity and rethinks social, political, and economic systems as well as urban designs. With attention to this need for structural change, Reimagining Sustainable Cities advocates for a community-informed model of racially, economically, and socially just cities and regions. The book aims to rethink urban sustainability for a new era. In Reimagining Sustainable Cities, Stephen M. Wheeler and Christina D. Rosan ask big-picture questions of interest to readers worldwide: How do we get to carbon neutrality? How do we adapt to a climate-changed world? How can we create affordable, inclusive, and equitable cities? While many books dwell on the analysis of problems, Reimagining Sustainable Cities prioritizes solutions-oriented thinking—surveying historical trends, providing examples of constructive action worldwide, and outlining alternative problem-solving strategies. Wheeler and Rosan use a social ecology lens and draw perspectives from multiple disciplines. Positive, readable, and constructive in tone, Reimagining Sustainable Cities identifies actions ranging from urban design to institutional restructuring that can bring about fundamental change and prepare us for the challenges ahead.

1

How Do We Get to Climate Neutrality?

In 2018 Africa experienced its highest temperature ever, when Ouargla, Algeria, experienced a high of 124.3°F (51.3°C).¹ That year a nuclear reactor in Sweden had to be shut down because the local seawater had become too warm to cool it.² Grocery stores had to be kept open around the clock as emergency cooling centers, since most Swedish homes don’t have air conditioning, Sweden not being historically a hot country.

In 2019 the city of Churu in India reached a temperature of 123.4°F (50.8°C), a few tenths of a degree short of the all-time Indian record set only three years earlier. Other North Indian cities baked as well, and the heat wave lasted for thirty-two days, the second-longest ever recorded. At least thirty-six people died.³

The next year the remote Siberian town of Verkhoyansk recorded a temperature of 100.4°F (38°C), the highest temperature ever recorded north of the Arctic Circle.⁴ That year a heat wave in California produced a new world record temperature: 130°F (54°C) in Death Valley.⁵ The same heat wave produced electrical storms that sparked fires across Northern California, one of them generating intense winds that produced a phenomenon new to many: the “firenado.”

The onward march of heat records is only one manifestation of the climate crisis.⁶ Drought and wildfires in 2010 destroyed much of the Russian wheat crop, leading global wheat prices to rise 84 percent. Supertyphoon Haiyan in 2013, with sustained winds of more than 195 mph, killed at least 6,700 people in the Philippines and left hundreds of thousands homeless. The 2018 California wildfires burned 1,893,913 acres, obliterated the town of Paradise, and led to insurance claims of more than $12 billion. The unprecedented extent of those fires was a shock until in 2020 a new round of fires burned 4,197,628 acres.

We start our reimagining of sustainable cities with the climate crisis, since this is the largest current sustainability challenge and the costs of inaction are enormous. Moreover, according to the editors of The Lancet, “Both Covid-19 and the climate crisis have exposed the fact that the poorest and most marginalised people in society, such as migrants and refugee populations, are always the most vulnerable to shocks.”⁷

Climate is also key to many other sustainability issues, illustrating ways that these challenges and their solutions are deeply intertwined. The goal is often seen as climate neutrality, in that the net quantity of greenhouse gases (GHGs) humanity contributes to the atmosphere must be zero, or preferably negative as societies figure out better ways to sequester the carbon that they have already emitted in soils, in forests, or perhaps underground. However, for particular communities, companies, or institutions climate neutrality can be a controversial term if it includes purchase of offsets that allow continued emissions (often affecting disadvantaged communities) on the promise that GHGs will be reduced elsewhere. In such cases, “carbon free,” “fossil free,” or “complete decarbonization” may be preferable goals ensuring that these entities do their part to rapidly end GHG emissions and achieve environmental justice goals.

Moving toward climate neutrality means actions at many scales—local, regional, state/provincial, national, and international. Addressing the climate crisis will probably also require more effective governance at each level, in turn creating the capacity to address a host of environmental, economic, and social needs. Conversely, not addressing the climate problem will compound sustainability challenges at many scales and create massive environmental justice problems as vulnerable populations suffer increased poverty, hunger, displacement, and violence.

So let us imagine communities that have quickly and decisively taken action to eliminate fossil fuels from buildings, industries, and vehicles. They generate 100 percent of their energy from renewable sources. They have greatly reduced methane emissions related to landfills and people’s diets. They have eliminated emissions of minor GHGs and spearheaded programs to sequester atmospheric carbon in forests and soils. And they have taken these steps in ways that are equitable and improve quality of life for everyone.

How can such a future come about?

In this chapter we’ll consider the evolution of the climate crisis and eight main strategies to end humanity’s increase of atmospheric GHGs. We’ll also discuss how the social ecology around this issue might be changed. The latter is particularly important because, as with other topics, the question of how to get around structural obstacles that prevent climate action can’t be separated from the question of how to reduce GHG emissions themselves. System change is needed, and this must go far deeper than many of the policies usually considered.

THE EVOLUTION OF A CRISIS

Concern about global warming dates back to 1898, when Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first calculated how much the Earth would be likely to warm with a doubling of atmospheric CO2, likely by 2100 on humanity’s current trajectory. Arrhenius estimated 4°C or 7.2°F, an amazingly accurate projection given that he did all of his calculations by hand. Recent estimates give a range of between 2.6° and 4.1°C, or 4.7° and 7.4°F.⁸

During the first half of the twentieth century the possibility of global warming seemed far away. Many scientists believed the oceans would absorb all of the carbon dioxide we were producing by burning fossil fuels. However, this situation changed in the 1950s. American scientists Hans Suess and Roger Revelle determined that the oceans would not in fact be able to solve the problem by completely soaking up CO2, and they testified to the US Congress in 1957 that radical climate changes might occur. Geochemist Charles Keeling began taking continuous measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii in 1958, producing hard evidence that concentrations were rising. Yet despite front-page media coverage in the late 1950s and authoritative research reports in the 1960s and 1970s, the world’s governments resisted action for another thirty years.

By the late 1980s the problem could no longer be ignored. The United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 to coordinate scientific research, even though some environmentalists at the time argued that this body was not needed since the science was already clear enough to justify action.⁹ That body has released assessment reports every five years summarizing consensus science on the issue. In 1992 the world’s nations agreed to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), acknowledging the climate crisis and beginning a long series of international meetings to produce binding treaties reducing emissions. The first of these was the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, agreed to by more than 190 countries, which established GHG reduction targets for thirty-five industrialized nations by 2008–12 averaging around 7 percent below 1990 levels. Exact mechanisms for reductions were left up to each country. Developing nations such as China and India weren’t covered by the agreement, partly because of beliefs that developed countries should bear greater responsibility for their historic emissions and had greater capacity to reduce emissions.¹⁰

A growing tide of neoliberal politics in the 1990s and 2000s undercut actions toward meeting the Kyoto goals. A disinformation campaign by the fossil fuel industry helped as well. Exxon and other companies knew the potential global warming effects of CO2 emissions as early as the 1950s but consciously decided in the 1980s to manipulate the media so as to confuse the public, putting forth false allegations about “unsettled science.”¹¹ Opportunistic politicians on the right of the political spectrum worked hand in glove with the fossil fuel industry. The George W. Bush administration withdrew the US from the Kyoto process in 2001, and Canada left in 2011 as tar sands development became a priority for conservative prime minister Stephen Harper’s government. By 2012 fewer than half of the thirty-five countries had met their Kyoto targets, and most of those were eastern European nations whose emissions had decreased because of economic decline. Even if goals had been achieved, the small Kyoto GHG reductions were not nearly enough to put the world on a path toward climate neutrality.

Nations at the 2015 Paris conference of the UNFCCC negotiated a new framework (the “Paris Agreement”) asking each country to develop its own voluntary targets and programs to hold global warming to 1.5° C. However, in the following years the Paris Agreement made no significant difference in the world’s emissions, which continued to increase except for a small dip due to the Covid-19 pandemic and recession.

This bleak picture in terms of international negotiations is not the only story, however. Many national governments have now acknowledged the necessary policy goal—very low or zero emissions by midcentury—even though few countries have met their own targets to date. Equally importantly, many states, provinces, and municipalities have taken leadership in adopting strong GHG mitigation policies. Examples range from Vancouver, British Columbia, reducing its residents’ driving by 36 percent per capita between 2007 and 2017 through improved public transit and bike facilities to Dubai’s development, in 2013, of the largest solar park in the world, a facility expected to have a capacity of five gigawatts by 2030, as much as five large nuclear power plants.¹² Such actions are very real steps toward climate-neutral cities and towns.

STRATEGIES FOR CLIMATE NEUTRALITY

Figure 3 shows that transportation, buildings, the production of goods and services, agriculture, and land use change produce most GHG emissions worldwide. Strategies for climate neutrality must zero out these basic sources. Initiatives to do this can be grouped in eight broad categories, with a ninth, geoengineering, to be considered as a last resort if all else fails (table 1).

FIGURE 3. Strategies for carbon neutrality will need to cross virtually every economic sector and end use. (World Resources Institute, “World Greenhouse Gas Emissions: 2016,” www.wri.org/data/world-greenhouse-gas-emissions-2016.)

TABLE 1 STRATEGIES FOR CLIMATE NEUTRALITY

Require Carbon-Free Electricity

Since production of electricity is responsible for a large share of GHG emissions almost everywhere, replacing coal, oil, and natural gas as electricity-generating fuels with renewable energy is an essential starting point for climate neutrality. The public sector can then require that electricity be used instead of fossil fuels for vehicles, factories, and home heating and cooling—indeed, almost all human activities except air travel. The goal is to bring about all-electric communities powered by renewably generated electricity.

Photovoltaic panels, large-scale concentrated solar power systems, and wind turbines can now produce electricity more cheaply than any fossil fuel in most parts of the world.¹³ If national and state governments eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and price in the externalities associated with fossil fuel use, their use will expand ever more rapidly. Geothermal plants, small-scale hydropower, tidal power, and biomass are other potentially cost-effective sources of clean electricity. To further speed the transition, governments could adopt modest incentives such as tax credits, low-interest financing, and fast-tra...