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One of the most striking changes at Rio+20, compared to the original 1992 Earth Summit, was the extensive discussion of population issues. In part, this reflects the fact that many developing countries, including the BRICs, are seeking to redefine what sustainability means with their generally rapid annual growth rates, and high population growth which is estimated to see world population rise from around 7 billion today, to between 8 billion and 11 billion by 2050.
This reminds us of the massive challenges, especially in the developing world, created by an ever-increasing number of humans on the planet.
Growing populations are also driving another mega trend -- urbanisation through migration. In 1800, less than 3% of the population lived in cities, yet by the end of 2008, this had risen to more than 50%, and there were 26 megacities (cities of 10 million or more inhabitants), including Rio itself.
Despite the economic success of megacities, governments at every level are preparing for the growing risks that these massive urban centers pose. It is therefore fitting that one of the focal points of Rio+20 was laying the foundations for a more sustainable development model for megacities and other large urban areas.
Key questions to be addressed include whether it will be possible to continually meet the everyday needs of food, water and health, and also deal with the growing vulnerability of megacities to environmental stresses exacerbated by the effects of climate change?
There is already cause for some alarm. For instance, the 2003 heat-wave in Paris was so devastating because both the public and authorities were unprepared for dealing with such extreme weather conditions, which were exacerbated by building practices, especially the lack of air-conditioning. Moreover, the tsunami in Japan last year forced Tokyo to re-consider its approach to nuclear power and to protecting its cities.
During the 21st century, megacities across the world will continue to grow, as will other large urban conglomerations which have megacity features. Energy demands will thus increase as supplies of food, water and resources for industries and infrastructure require energy for transportation.
The associated increased carbon emissions are contributing to global warming and pose their own climate risks. In China, where people are being subsidised to move from the countryside, cities have grown by a factor of 2 in only 5 years. The local urban ‘heat island’ effect means temperatures are increasing about three times faster than the rate of temperature rise over global and national land areas.
The main risk for riverine megacities on coastal plains is their increasing vulnerability to rising sea levels and river flooding. There will be further episodes such as the one in New Orleans seven years ago when it was hit by Hurricane Katrina, without adequate protection and flood warning systems.
In at-risk countries, such as the Netherlands, researchers are preparing for these type of problems. For instance, Delft University’s Hydraulic Engineering Department has been developing a state of the art early warning and monitoring system, including the effects of subsidence, to protect coastal communities.
The larger the urban area, the greater the damage that natural hazards can inflict; and increasingly it may be impossible to protect life and property even if there is a perfect warning system. As a major hurricane in Houston showed last year, despite the known dangers from combined hazards such as winds and floods, there is now insufficient time to evacuate some cities safely, even highly developed ones.
So there is a pressing need for cities to develop emergency refuge areas. In some cases these may already exist. For instance, Canvey Island in England still keeps its mound in case severe floods of the nature of 1953 return.
In most cases, however, refuges will need to be built from scratch. Thus, engineers and planners are considering how to identify and design such emergency centers, whether outside or within buildings, and how these should be connected to the wider urban system, including transportation.
Training populations to use the centers effectively is also essential. Refuges have successfully withstood cyclones and floods in Bangladesh and, unlike those in some other developing countries, have been used by vulnerable communities, because they could take their vital farm animals with them -- without the animals they are destitute.
Emergency energy supplies for communities, which are essential for medical emergencies, should improve in future. This is especially so using advanced solar power — effective even in cloudy conditions.
Because of the failures to deal with some of the recent hazards impacting on megacities, governments at every level are planning for multiple hazards and developing strategies for managing the range of environmental factors which could emerge. Moreover, other research teams are collaborating in construction of ‘system dynamics’ models for the operation of infrastructure, environment and socio-economic aspects of megacities.
These models resemble well-known computer programs for global climate change and its interconnections to economic developments. As with Delft University’s coastal monitoring system, these will help cities to predict which hazards they face and help them decide how to prepare.
The London Mayor’s office is taking a particular interest in which policy options emerge as London continues to expand. Meanwhile, several cities are experimenting with air quality hazard indicators based on complex system models to appraise citizens about how the environment in their cities varies hourly and over the longer term.
What these models need is improved availability of relevant environmental and socio-economic data. Here, international agencies such as the World Health Organisation and the World Meteorological Organisation, as well as national governments, need to collaborate with a wider range of organisations, and make maximum use of new media. This will better enable data showing how people experience both rapidly occurring hazards such as tornadoes, and slower, but still deadly, phenomenon such as loss of crops from rising sea levels and salt penetration.
Fortunately, megacities have a global organisation for information exchange and collaboration called C40 Cities. The future agenda here includes enhanced inter-city cooperation on policies for dealing with hazards, and putting more pressure on national governments to assist, especially with finance and data, and strategic priorities.
© Japan Today
11 Comments
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REMzzz
Well, the problem there was due to them chopping out all the reeds that used to be in their part of the gulf coast. Leave the vegetation alone, and hurricanes will be a lot milder if there is nowhere for them to spin up.
In Japan, the tsunami had nothing to do with rising sea levels. I'm not sure that rising sea levels can be balmed for everything. Marshall islands and Thailand maybe, but there are many cases where the problem is man-made.
It can be fun blaming "building practices" when air conditioners are missing from 150 year old buildings. Perhaps the issue has more to do with people not retrofitting their apartments and offices, than the way they were built 100, 75 or even 40 years ago, when A/C was not so commonplace. You either have to carve out another vent in a brick wall or have the A/C hanging out of and cluttering up the window.
Clearly, when people are used to not needing A/C the tradeoff doesn't seem worth it until a weather anomaly appears
gaijinfo
"Sustainable" has become the buzzword for the leftist, socialist redistribution of wealth schemes and the destruction of society. Another scam to give central planners more power and influence.
Left to their own devices, capitalists (free from government intervention) will ALWAYS find better, cleaner, and more efficient ways to use scarce resources, as they have for centuries.
To wit:
http://www.learnliberty.org/content/are-we-running-out-resources
Christopher Blackwell
gaijinfo,
Interesting, as we have followed conservative practices here in the United States for the last decade and have seen everything from the economy, to our infrastructure, get worse. We lowered the taxes on the wealthy and have seen it destroy our middle classes and harm our poor and make more of them.
Now there is the attack on birth control so we are not even beginning to deal with the basic problem of birth rate that drives all the other problems.
On a finite planet one cannot run forever on a system that requires endless growth. As for redistribution of wealth,why is that not bad when the wealthy take more and more of the wealth for themselves, leaving less for the majority of the people? You cannot build a healthy economy of only rich and poor. Without a very large middle class you cannot have much of an economy. History shows that.
gaijinfo
Mr. Blackwell,
First of all, the practices in the states are nothing close to a free market. There's plenty of protectionism, tariffs, and crony capitalism on both sides of the aisle.
Second, there's something called "demographic shift" in which developing countries, as they become more wealthy, show a DECREASE in births. Unless you are promoting some kind of massive genocide or selective births like in China.
Thirdly, you speak as if there is a small pile of wealth that is finite and the wealthy have somehow cheated and got more than there fair share. The term, distribution, in "distribution of wealth" is a statistical term. There was no original pile of wealth, and it wasn't "distributed" out to people.
As economies progress, more and more wealth is created, FOR EVERYBODY. People that were poor ten years ago are not poor today. That's the biggest mistake people make when they talk about the so called "shrinking middle class." Those are statistical ranges, they aren't actual people. Somebody that was in the "lower middle class" range is not likely going to be there their whole lives. Similarly, those in the top 1% were once in the lower 1% (except those extremely rare few that were born into money) and they usually aren't in the 1% for very long.
Creating wealth (e.g. creating a product or service that people are willing to pay money for) is a skill just like any other skill. Some people are really good at creating wealth, some people aren't. Just like some people are really good at playing the violin, and others suck at it.
nath
Free market extremists are the Bolshevik true believers of today. Their faith in a laissez faire paradise is a utopian pipedream just as much as the worker`s paradise of Soviet Russia ever was.
This is why free marketers can ALWAYS say(after the sh** hits the fan like it ALWAYS does after years of increasing deregulatory policies) things like "the practices in the states are nothing close to a free market". They can always say this because a "true" free market is impossible. Governments are always needed to impose unpopular deregularity policies on societies and "free marketers" need the laws of government to be rescued after the inevitable crisis or collapse of the economy that their deregulatory policies bring about. Deregulation inevitably brings the economy/society to the precipace so that governments are forced to enact regulatory policies and to hand out taxpayer bailouts in order to save the system from destroying itself.
Free marketers then can say "look see - it is not "a real free market" . Rinse and repeat - over and over..
jessebaybay
Everything you are saying is so backwards. This isn't the 80's my friend. Capitalism left to its own devices without government intervention has proven to be a mistake. Purely for the fact that humans are greedy. Capitalism has become a way for these men and woman to gain more control than the governments themselves through the creation of mega corporations. This is never a good thing and now (using america as an example) we are up s***t creek without a paddle. The divide in classes could be considered Ruler and Servant.
Just like every other ideology and idea, on paper they seem wonderful but in practice they always fail. Exactly like communism. The only thing that will ever work is if every one stopped being greedy - we all know that will never happen.
Thomas Anderson
Nice ad hominem.
Is that why we're threatened with global warming now?
Thomas Anderson
And of course you will probably ignore/deny global warming, because the whole idea of capitalism is TO MAKE MONEY and if science gets in the way of MAKING MONEY then DAMN SCIENCE TO HELL!
Thomas Anderson
You hit the nail on the head. Laissez faire utopians ideals eerily mirror the communist utopians ideals. When something does go wrong they always blame the fact that it was not "true" free-market or "true" communism. They're both chasing the same mirage which is illusory at best. I guess they're both just different sides of the same coin.
nath
Change the record, please!
nath
I think what the European self-righteous Green Elite want is they keep their huge mansions in the countryside and the rest of humanity gets boxed in inside tiny apartments in cramped cities.