Leading Cities’ CEO, Michael Lake, and Andrew McCue, an economy consultant at Metabolic, urge leadership in two key areas that provide hope in cities’ battle against climate change and their shift towards sustainability.
As world leaders gathered in Glasgow for the Cop26 meeting, goals and promises for achieving global sustainability were made and shared. Despite the promises of the past, the world is far from reaching the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting temperature rise to just 1.5-2.0ºC.
No overarching goal set a or promise made by national leaders can be achieved without the transformation of cities to sustainable communities. Cities are attaching a suite of similar monikers to their branding, their economic development plans, their neighbourhood projects, and their urban master plans.
Everywhere you look at cities, you will find “green,” “sustainable,” “resilient,” “carbon neutral,” “net-zero” and “circular” cities. The terminology is so ubiquitous and overlapping that it can be easy to lose sight of what we mean, when we talk about sustainability in cities.
In any discussion of sustainable cities and a sustainable economy, this question needs to be posed more often: “sustainability? Yeah sure. But what are we sustaining?”
Energy consumption
According to the UNDP, while cities occupy a tiny fraction of the earth’s surface, they “account for about 80 per cent of energy consumption and at least 70 per cent of carbon emissions. At the same time, cities also generate about 80 per cent of the global GDP and are known as hubs for innovation.” On top of this, the Integrated Resource Plan 2019 found that “in low-income countries, current resource consumption is only two tons per person, whereas high-income countries consume more than 13 times this amount at around 27 tons a year. To give a concrete demonstration of what this discrepancy means, Our World In Data explains “in just 2.3 days the average American or Australian emits as much as the average Malian or Nigerian in a year”.
Sustainability carries with it the implication that we are aiming to carry on doing what we have been doing, indefinitely. This would mean sustaining the vast overconsumption and destruction of earth’s resources, sustaining the vastly unequal distribution of wealth, health and wellbeing from these resources. Following this logic makes “sustainability” sound far less appealing. Instead, more and more organisations are turning to regeneration, circularity, environmental justice, and restoration. One model worth considering is Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economy which aims to meet all human needs within ecological thresholds.
To do this, sustainability in cities will mean reinventing cities into healthy, regenerative, resource-efficient, circular environments – transitioning cities to becoming producers rather than massive consumers of global resources. Such a transformation can lead not only to enormous environmental benefits, but also to huge positive outcomes in human health and wellbeing. In this effort to reinvent cities, there are two trends that provide hope in cities’ leadership on climate change and sustainability.
The first is the growing recognition of the importance of consumption-based emissions (also known as Scope 3 emissions). These are the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the raw material extraction, processing, manufacturing, and transportation that delivers finished products to people and businesses in cities. Because it can be difficult to get a detailed measurement of total material or product consumption in a city and because the emissions are happening far away, these emissions have generally flown under the radar; however, it doesn’t matter where in the world greenhouse gases are emitted, they still pose an existential threat to our communities, cities, and economies.
What’s more, C40’s work with 79 cities showed that the traditional sector-based approach significantly under-counted emissions. When they tracked the emissions embedded in consumption and imported goods, the carbon footprint of these cities increased by 60 per cent. Similar research from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation noted that renewable energy and energy efficiency can address only around 55 per cent of emissions: “The remaining 45 per cent comes from producing the cars, buildings, clothes, food and other products we use every day.”
Fortunately, cities like Portland, Oregon have been advocating for consumption-based emissions inventories and launching programmes aimed at building up sustainable consumption habits and systems. Even better, Portland’s work on this topic is matched at a higher level by the State of Oregon. Meanwhile, C40 and ICLEI have both launched support programmes to help cities understand and apply the consumption-based emissions inventory. There has also been a surge in popularity of circular economy approaches, coalitions, and frameworks, largely because city leaders are fast recognising the links between getting the most out of our materials and products, reducing our virgin material consumption, and decarbonisation.
Indeed, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation has been working with cities like London, New York, and Sao Paolo on circular economy strategies to reduce the over-consumption of virgin materials and products. Many more cities (for example, Charlotte, Boulder, Rotterdam) are adopting circular economy strategies and Amsterdam has become the first city to explicitly base its planning on Kate Raworth’s Doughnet Economy. These strategies take a variety of approaches such as matching local production with local demand, facilitating reuse and repair networks, setting up deconstruction facilities and adjusting procurement practices and updating their building codes. ICLEI has even set up a Global Knowledge Hub to help cities understand and select best practices, policies, and technologies for their community.
Interconnected challenges
The second encouraging trend among smart cities is the full recognition of the interconnection between challenges and dynamics across energy, climate action, waste, equity and economic development. Crucially, this recognition is leading cities to start to integrate planning across formerly siloed areas. For example, Fort Collins’ Our Climate Future plan combined their energy, solid waste management, and climate action plans into one comprehensive effort that is engineered around the central goal of community ownership and equity.
Further building on the overlap of development plans, equity, and economic health, other cities are finding ways to enable and encourage Community Land Trusts. While this may seem like a daunting administrative task, it is absolutely crucial as long-range planning already reaches beyond 2030.
Many city plans are created on 10 or even 20-year cycles, so if the world is to have any hope of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, we need these plans to reflect cities’ needs in that future rather than merely iterating on what they’ve done in the past. Integrating climate action, waste management, economic development, and master plans recognises that each of these plans creates enabling or obstructing conditions for each of the others.
Those cities that are taking a systems approach to their planning by integrating previously siloed plans are setting their communities up for success in the coming decade(s). As the world races toward the dreaded point of no return, cities will and must play an integral role in combatting climate change, and embracing these two critical success factors for sustainable cities is a necessary starting point for all to understand.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Michael Lake, Andrew McCue
Quelle/Source: Smart Cities World, 26.11.2021
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