The UN predicts that 68% of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050, making a focus on implementing strategies to cut back on their carbon emissions crucial to a sustainable future. Currently, cities are responsible for 70% of carbon emissions worldwide. Plus, more than 90% of the world’s urban centers are on coastal land and 70% of the world’s cities have already experienced the effects of climate change.
Coastal Cities & Sea Level Rise
- By 2050, over 570 low-lying coastal cities will face projected sea level rise by at least 0,5 meters.
- This puts over 800 million people at risk from the impacts of rising seas and storm surges.
- The global economic costs to cities, from rising seas and flooding, could amount to $1 trillion by mid-century.
- Local factors mean that cities will experience sea level rise at different paces. Cities on the east coast of the United States, along with major cities in Asia, are particularly vulnerable.
- Sea level rise and flooding can impact essential services such as energy, transport, and health. When Hurricane Sandy struck New York in 2012, coastal floods impacted an estimated 90,000 buildings, 2 million people lost power, which caused extensive damage and disrupted commercial activity to a cost of over $19 billion.
- Resilience strategies, strengthened coastal protection, upgrades to existing buildings and infrastructure, relocation from the most at-risk areas as well as community engagement and preparedness can help cities adapt to sea level rise and coastal flooding. C40 Cities. The Future We Don’t Want
Ending Climate Change Begins in the City
Despite the threat from rising sea levels, C40Cities claims “Ending Climate Change Begins in the City.” Urban density, they say, “can actually create the possibility for a better quality of life and a lower carbon footprint through more efficient infrastructure and planning.”
Drawing more people into cities could help significantly shrink the country’s overall greenhouse gas emissions. Low-density developments produced nearly four times the greenhouse gas emissions of high-density alternatives, with research finding that doubling urban density can reduce carbon pollution from household travel by nearly half and residential energy use by more than a third. The Guardian. Denser cities could be a climate boon – but nimbyism stands in the way.
In a C40 report “Reinventing Cities” the organization stresses the need to construct “compact, resilient and well-connected communities” as “our best chance to preserve our global resources and fragile biodiversity for future generations. Now more than ever, we must harness a model for low-carbon urban development that promotes a thriving and inclusive future for all city residents.”
One of the most significant strategies to cut back on carbon outputs, climate scientists suggest, is to make cities denser.
This change, scientists have calculated, is even more impactful than installing solar panels on all new constructions or retrofitting old buildings with energy-saving technologies. Residents of cities like San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Minneapolis already have much lower carbon footprints than in the surrounding suburban sprawl. City dwellers tend to have smaller apartments that require less energy to heat and cool. www.theguardian.com/...
President Biden recognizes the role more compact cities can play in the future, urging cities to change zoning laws to boost density and limit single-family housing developments, as well as rip up highways that have cleaved apart communities, typically communities of color, and added to air pollution.
“Downtowns have jobs, shopping, and schools, places that people want to drive to, but you need to have many cores, rather than just one,” said Christopher Jones, a climate policy expert at the University of California, Berkeley. “Having everyone coming into one hub isn’t efficient. You need many hubs and different spokes in the wheel connecting them.”
The short video below highlights some more realistic sustainable cities already in existence, in the process of being built, or in the early planning stages.
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