Showing posts from category urbanization.
-
Sustainable Development
›Are Women the Key to Sustainable Development?, by Candice Stevens and appearing in Boston University’s Sustainable Development Insights series, asks whether gender-conscious development strategies are the missing link in the three pillars–social, economic, and environmental–of sustainable development. She points out that “An increasing number of studies indicate that gender inequalities are extracting high economic costs and leading to social inequities and environmental degradation around the world.” In the policy world gender-conscious initiatives are often more effective as well. “United Nations and World Bank studies show that focusing on women in development assistance and poverty reduction strategies leads to faster economic growth than ‘gender neutral’ approaches.” Stevens finds that achieving greater gender parity may be the key to better governance, increased growth, and a safer environment.
The Role of Cities in Sustainable Development, by David Satherwaite and also appearing in Boston University’s Sustainable Development Insights series, argues that traditional depictions of cities as dirty and unsustainable are inaccurate. Instead, “…with the right innovation and incentives in place, cities can allow high living standards to be combined with resource consumption that is much lower than the norm in most cities today,” he finds. Satherwaite contends that high-density living arrangements can reduce per capita energy consumption, transportation emissions, and costs of public service provisions like hospitals and schools. However, he warns that none of these potential advantages are guaranteed, and city planners must utilize effective local governance in order to make cities safe, clean, and sustainable. -
Visualizing Human and Natural Resources
›In the policy world, statistics, percentages, and budgets on the order of millions and billions are routinely thrown around. But what do six and a half billion people, 957 tonnes per second, or three trillion dollars really look like?A visualization of London’s natural resources – grass, trees, and water only – by Adam Nieman.
Visual artist Adam Nieman recently received attention from The New York Time’s Dot Earth Blog for his illuminating scale models of hard-to-envision quantities such as the volume of oil being leaked from the Deepwater Horizon wells, global carbon emissions as measured in “UN Building units per second,” and the relatively small amount of air and water on Earth.
Demographers and sustainability experts often warn about the increasingly smaller allotment of natural resources per capita, but few have illustrated that reality at such a human scale as Nieman does.On a global level, Nieman’s work shows the tremendous population density of the world’s “urban island.” Over half of the global population now lives in cities, which is represented by the grey dot, just 616 km across in “Land-Cover Islands.”
Others seeking to improve quantitative visualizations include David McCandless of the site Information Is Beautiful. Among other things, McCandless has tackled the daunting task of accurately comparing spending in an age of trillion dollar budgets, with his “Billion Dollar Gram.”
Another group, the Dutch firm TD Architects, highlights the disparity between global demographics and the distribution of wealth with “Walled World.”
Nieman’s blog examines the confusion that often occurs at the interface between the political and scientific worlds. This confusion is amply demonstrated by debates over contentious issues such as budget priorities, population growth, and climate change.
Politicians often ask that complex problems be distilled into simple bullet points for speeches and policy documents. However, when it comes to problems of such complexity and scale, pictures like these may be worth a thousand bullet points.
Sources: New York Times, Reuters.
Photo Credit: “Green London (wide)” and “land cover islands” courtesy of flickr user JohnJobby. -
Urbanization, Climate Change, and Indigenous Populations: Finding USAID’s Comparative Advantage
›May 26, 2010 // By Kayly Ober“Part of the outflow of migrants from rural areas of many Latin American countries has settled in remote rural areas, pushing the agricultural frontier further into the forest,” writes David López-Carr in a recent article in Population & Environment, “The population, agriculture, and environment nexus in Latin America.” In a May 4 presentation at the LAC Economic Growth and Environment Strategic Planning Workshop in Panama City, Panama, he discussed how to integrate family planning and environmental services in rural Latin America.
Latin America is one of the most highly urbanized continents in the world, with an average of 75 percent of the population living in cities. However, “there are two Latin Americas,” said López-Carr at the workshop, which was sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and Brazil Institute, as well as the U.S. Agency for International Development. Largely developed countries like Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay are close to 90 percent urbanized, while Guatemala, Ecuador, and Bolivia are about 50 percent. In less urbanized countries, rural-rural migrants in search of agricultural land remain a major driving force behind forest conversion, he said.
Between 1961 and 2001, Central America’s rural population increased by 59 percent, said Lopez-Carr. The increasing density of the rural population had a negative impact on forest reserves: a 15 percent increase in deforestation totaling some 13 million hectares.
“Rural areas of Latin America still have high fertility rates but (unlike much of rural Africa, for example) also have a high unmet demand for contraception, meaning that improved contraceptive availability would likely result in a rapid and cost-effective means to reduce population pressures in priority conservation areas,” he said. Additionally, remote rural areas with high population growth rates tend to be associated with indigenous populations located in close proximity to protected forests.
For example, in Guatemala, communities surrounding Sierra de Lacandon National Park have, since 1990, grown by 10 percent each year, with birthrates averaging eight children per woman. Larger communities and larger households have led to agricultural expansion, which infringes on the park and accelerates deforestation in one of the most biologically diverse biospheres in the world, said López-Carr.
Based on these demographic and environmental trends, López-Carr suggested USAID’s work in the region should focus on rural maternal and child health, and education – especially for girls. Not only does USAID already invest in such programs, but they only cost pennies per capita and could reduce the number of rural poor living in Latin American cities by tens of millions.
Given the strong links between population density and deforestation in Latin America, expanding access to family planning would also be a smart investment in forest conservation and climate mitigation, López-Carr concluded.
Source: Population Reference Bureau.
Photo Credit: Dave Hawxhurst, Woodrow Wilson Center. -
‘NATO 2020’ Recommendations Avoid “New Security” Challenges
›May 25, 2010 // By Schuyler NullA recently released report, NATO 2020, outlines expert recommendations for the alliance’s new strategic concept. However, while pointing to a nighttime satellite image of the globe at a Wilson Center conference last week, Professor Peter Liotta of Salve Regina University said the report focuses too much on conventional self-defense, when most of the new security challenges of the 21st century will come from areas of the world “where the lights are out.”
In an interview with New Security Beat, Liotta criticized NATO 2020’s emphasis on what he sees as a reactive, rather than a proactive, stance. By ignoring “new security” vulnerabilities such as environmental and demographic challenges, NATO may end up creating more threats for itself down the line, he said.
The report briefly acknowledges that demographic change and environmental degradation represent sources of uncertainty in forecasting global trends. However, neither are included as major threats to the alliance. Instead, the authors say the most probable threats are nuclear or non-nuclear armed ballistic missiles, terror attacks, and cyber intrusion.
Discussions about non-traditional security vulnerabilities often produce contentious and conflicting viewpoints, which makes it easier to ignore them, said Liotta. However, it is important for NATO to realize that security threats – even more conventional ones – do not exist in isolation.
Liotta said the continued focus on NATO’s Article 5, the invocation of collective self-defense, overshadows other important foundations of the alliance. For example, Article 2, which encourages “promoting conditions of stability,” could be invoked to help the alliance address non-traditional security threats.
In his presentation, Liotta, formerly of the U.S. Naval War College, cited mass migration, water scarcity, and low probability, high-risk events, such as rapid sea-level rise from Arctic ice melt, as examples of challenges that NATO should be preparing to meet. He also drew attention to the security challenges of a burgeoning global population, saying that rapid growth and urbanization will produce 600 cities with more than one million people by 2025.
Such extreme events as the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, China, which killed about 90,000 people and left five million homeless, might be a symptom of the strain our growing population has placed on the Earth’s natural systems, said Liotta. Scientists point out that an earthquake of such magnitude has never been seen in Sichuan and that large construction projects – particularly a large dam and reservoir that lie within 550 yards of the fault line – have likely had a considerable effect on local geology.
In Europe’s current deployment-adverse, difficult fiscal environment, it is perhaps understandable that NATO planners would focus on concrete threats rather than emerging vulnerabilities. But, as Liotta argues, the consequences for ignoring these new security challenges could be no less dire.
Sources: Daily Mail, Foreign Policy, NATO, Telegraph.
Photo Credit: “The Night Lights of Planet Earth” courtesy of flickr user woodleywonderworks. -
Challenges Found in ‘The Places We Live’
›May 18, 2010 // By Julien KatchinoffThe work of photographer Jonas Bendicksen provided the inspiration for a research paper competition organized by the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Comparative Urban Studies Project, the Cities Alliance, the International Housing Coalition, USAID, and the World Bank. At “The Places We Live: Slums and Urban Poverty in the Developing World,” four of the winning papers (out of 200 entries) were critiqued by urbanization policy experts. The authors focused on critical issues facing the world’s rapidly urbanizing centers, including service delivery, the challenge of political cleavages, redevelopment mechanisms, sanitation, and citizen participation in urban development.
The competition was established to “tap into the academic community and encourage … a younger generation of academics…to think about the challenges of rapid urbanization and the needs of slum dwellers and what we can do about it,” said USAID’s Jessica Tulodo. “It is the central issue that we are going to be grappling with for the coming decades and beyond. How do we not just address the challenges, but harness the opportunities of urban growth and how do we ensure that the larger population of urban poor can benefit and participate?”
“This is an effort to rekindle a stronger debate between the academic community and policymakers. I think that’s desperately absent, particularly in this field,” said Christopher Williams, the U.S. Representative of UN-HABITAT.
All Politics Are Local: Urban Services in Zambia
In her case study of the shanty compounds on the periphery of Lusaka, Zambia, Danielle Resnick investigates how the ruling government — through “development initiatives” — suppresses political opposition and controls weaker economic and political factions. The difficult relationship between local service delivery and inter-party politics is endemic in many African countries, where local municipalities are often run by opposition parties.
Christopher Williams, in his review, praised Resnick’s work for capturing the intricacies and complexity of rapid urbanization in Zambia and beyond, noting that it offered a “scathing” critique of direct budget assistance by foreign donors.
“Land Sharing”: A New Approach for Slums in Southeast Asia
Paul Rabe’s “Land Sharing in Phnom Penh and Bangkok: Lessons From Four Decades of Innovative Slum Redevelopment Projects in Two Southeast Asian ‘Boom Towns'” examines the emerging issue of land conflict in redeveloping urban areas and innovative solutions such as land sharing. Sometimes called a “win-win-win,” land sharing through multi-use agreements based on maximized utility can help to mediate the needs of slum dwellers, private developers, and municipal governments.
Rabe found that land sharing has several limitations, including programmatic delays, muted benefits for stakeholders, and limited deployments. “In retrospect,” he said, “the institutional setting [for land sharing] is not mature enough to accommodate a fairly complex redevelopment procedure.”
If donors and civil society groups are willing to brave a complex and highly politicized environment, land sharing may be an innovative option for those looking to quell redevelopment conflict. Robin Rajack of the World Bank said it was critical for the future sustainability of growing urbanization, as improving the ability of the urban poor to navigate difficult land tenure changes may foster urban economic growth.
Maintaining Sanitation, Building Community in India
In “Desired Outcomes, Unexpected Processes: Two Stories of Sanitation Maintenance in Erode Tenements, India,” Sai Balakrishnan asks why, “within the same municipality, are residents of some tenements more willing to contribute towards septic tank maintenance than others?” Her analysis of two communities in the state of Tamil Nadu in Southern India finds that asset ownership, embedded and accessible politicians, and political patronage did not improve maintenance of sanitation infrastructure. Instead, the critical factors were the spatial proximity of infrastructure, bundling of water and sanitation services, and “street-level bureaucrats.”
Reviewer Bob Buckley of the Rockefeller Foundation asked if future research could incorporate empirical data on the costs of sanitation problems for communities, “beyond the visuals,” which could provide a deeper understanding of the difficulty of delivering services in urban slums.
Gaming Community Participation in Argentina
Josh Lerner’s “What Games Can Teach Us about Community Participation: Participatory Urban Development in Rosario’s Villas” reveals the results of his six months of fieldwork in the slums of Rosario, Argentina. Although urban redevelopment can produce conflict–especially when combined with vast inequities in economic and political power–Lerner found that taking a game theory approach to difficult land-use decisions helped to “enhance the quality of community participation, by making it more attractive, active, and effective, and making decisions fairer and more transparent.”
William Corbett of Cities Alliance warned that if developing countries cannot effectively deal with the chaotic informality of land tenure and urban development, “gangs with guns will do it for you”– particularly when urban change and resource or land scarcity provokes competition for limited resources.
Photo Credits: “Christopher Williams, Danielle Resnick; Moynahan Boardroom” courtesy of David Hawxhurst.
-
New Research on Population and Climate: The Impact of Demographic Change on Carbon Emissions
›“Policies that have the effect…of leading to lower fertility and to slower population growth can be considered ‘win-win’ from the climate point of view,” said Brian O’Neill of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) at a recent Wilson Center event on his latest research. Yet while the connection between demographic change and CO2 emissions is implicitly understood among both researchers and policymakers, it “has not really caught on,” he added.
In response to critiques of earlier studies looking at demographic change and CO2 emissions—which the climate research community has faulted for their lack of sophistication, use of unfamiliar analytic approaches, and failure to clearly demonstrate the magnitude of the connection—O’Neill is using a novel, more rigorous approach that he hopes will provide a clearer understanding of the links between demography and climate change.
The Population Factor
To generate CO2 emissions scenarios for the next 100 years, O’Neill’s team used the Population-Environment-Technology (PET) Model, originally created by Lawrence H. Goulder and Michael Dalton of Stanford. The PET Model takes its basic assumptions on regional economic growth, technological development, change in population characteristics, and other factors from the IPCC’s A2 and B2 scenarios, but replaces each scenario’s singular population growth curve with high and low alternatives from the United Nations Population Division.
Like other climate models, the PET Model divides the world into nine regions. “You don’t want to treat economies—or the demography, the consumption patterns, the energy system, and so on—of sub-Saharan Africa the same as you do for the U.S. or EU,” he said.What makes the O’Neill’s approach unique, however, is his attention to the sub-regional level. “Typically in these models…you break the world up into nine regions, but then you treat everyone in sub-Saharan Africa the same, everyone in China the same,” said O’Neill.
By drawing on data from detailed surveys of 800,000 households from 35 countries, O’Neill and his team demonstrated that the distinctions between urban and rural, older and younger, and smaller and larger households hold important implications for carbon emissions. This inclusion of demographic sub-factors allows a deeper degree of analysis than models that treat all households the same. They found that age structure, household size, and urbanization all altered emissions outputs.
Could Bending Population Growth Curves Reduce Emissions?
In the long run, the potential for demographic shifts to reduce CO2 emissions “is a big number,” said O’Neill. In the medium term, for example by the middle of the century, results are less clear. To compare population-related emissions reductions to other carbon-reduction opportunities, he evoked Socolow and Pacala’s “stabilization wedge” framework. The wedge framework posits 15 opportunities, or wedges, to eventually reduce CO2 emissions by 1 billion tons of carbon equivalent per year. They contend that implementing any 7 of the wedges could stabilize CO2 emissions by 2050 and, if followed by additional measures reducing emissions below today’s levels, would stabilize the atmospheric concentration of CO2 at 550 ppm and forestall the worst impacts of climate change.
Would reducing population growth equal a wedge? The full results, currently under review at a scientific journal, will seek to answer this question. “Slower population growth can’t solve the climate problem,” he concluded. “But it can certainly help.” -
Event Update: Sustainable Urbanization
›April 21, 2010 // By Julien KatchinoffThe newfound American engagement on international urban issues lauded by UN-HABITATS’ Christopher Williams and the Wilson Center’s Blair Ruble last week has been formalized in legislation introduced today by Senator Benjamin L. Cardin (D-MD), Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-MA), and Senator Dick Durbin. (D-IL)
From Modernize Aid:The Sustainable Urban Development Act of 2010 (S. 3229) seeks to deal with unprecedented growth from enlarging slums, increasing levels of pollution, overburdened transport systems, and the lack of affordable housing. The bill would direct the USAID Administrator to: 1) develop a strategy to foster sustainable urban development; 2) consider establishing a senior advisor for urban development; and 3) establish a pilot urban strategies initiative that will help a select number of cities create a policy framework for future growth and development.
In a statement for the release of the legislation, Senator Kerry echoed Williams’ thoughts on the subject of urbanization and U.S. foreign policy. “There is an explosion of urban growth around the globe – already the majority of the world’s population lives in urban areas, with approximately one billion people residing in slums. The phenomenon of urbanization will be ignored at our own peril. Responsible citizens of the world must consciously harness their creativity and ingenuity to increase the livability, economic viability, and environmental sustainability of our cities,” Kerry said.
Facts about the Sustainable Urban Development Act of 2010:(From the Press Release, COMTEX)
(Summary Courtesy Congressional Documents and Publications/ContentWorks via COMTEX)
* The bill includes a statement of policy that recognizes urban development as an objective of United States foreign policy and overseas development assistance, particularly programs that foster improved urban governance, management, and planning, promote the formal provision of and access to essential urban services and infrastructure, expand access to basic shelter, affordable urban housing, promote economic growth and alleviate poverty, and respond to and prepare for environmental and climatic challenges.
* It directs the Administrator of USAID to develop a strategy to foster sustainable urban development that will update the Making Cities Work Urban Strategy. Specifically:
– Assess the feasibility of establishing a senior advisor for urban sustainable development at USAID, who would provide leadership for coordinated programming, technical support for urban development, disseminate best practices, guide urban programming, and help build the capacity of government officials in developing countries to more effectively manage urbanization
– Consider establishing a pilot urban strategies initiative that would support, through technical and financial assistance, a select number of cities in developing countries by identifying, developing, and implementing long-term sustainable urban development strategies to provide a framework for future growth and development in identified countries
– Review and assess existing or past U.S. programs and foreign assistance strategies designed to improve urban development and ensure that strategies to address urban development and slums in developing countries are integrated into the broader strategic foreign assistance plans of USAID and the Department of State
– Develop a strategy for providing long-term United States support for sustainable urban growth and development initiatives that draws upon the expertise of U.S. city and regional elected officials and professionals, private foundations, NGOs, policy, education and research organizations, United Nations organizations, and multilateral development banks.
Photo Credit: “US Capitol” courtesy Flickr User ehpien -
Water Scarcity in Dhaka: The Mess in Bangladesh
›April 20, 2010 // By Julien KatchinoffPersistent drought, heat, electrical brownouts, and overconsumption have forced the government of Bangladesh to militarize the distribution of water in its capital of Dhaka. “Deployment of military for water distribution is not a permanent solution,” said Abdur Rahim to the Financial Express, as he waited for water. “We want a permanent way out. The government must rise up to the occasion as it has become a national crisis.”
The Bangladesh military will be assisting the Dhaka Water Supply and Sewage Authority’s (WASA) tanker truck operations and ensuring security as they distribute their water throughout the parched city. Due to the sensitivity of these critical operations, commanding officers have been assigned to monitor each water district.
During an interview with Bangladesh News 24, the WASA chairman promised residents that the military deployment, though becoming a yearly response to seasonal droughts, would be removed as soon as the drought abated, noting that “the army will be withdrawn once the situation improves.”
As a result of a falling water table and an overburdened energy grid, WASA is only able to provide 1.5 billion liters of water a day to a public that requires over 2.25 billion liters. “The situation is turning from bad to worse every day, we stand in long queues for hours for water,” rickshaw-puller Mohammad Salam told Bangladesh News.
In recent days, hundreds of Dhaka residents defied government protest bans and took to the streets to demand clean drinking water. Though currently peaceful, these protests echo similar building tensions in 2006 that culminated in clashes with police and the deaths of 20 people.
Long-term population pressures in Bangladesh and a reliance on groundwater have only served to exacerbate the current crisis. In an op-ed in The Daily Star, Dr. M. Rafique Uddin drew attention to the city’s unsustainable reliance on groundwater supplies and warned that construction trends were forecasting weaker recharge rates for the fragile aquifers. “Because of land-filling, surface water does not percolate and recharge the groundwater table,” he wrote. “It is estimated that we are losing 1-2 inches of water table every year. With more and more land filling and concretization of Metro Dhaka, this rate of groundwater depletion would be worse.”
During a ceremony for a new water treatment plant, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina placed much of the blame on a burgeoning population. Not withstanding, the Bangladeshi government is working to provide its citizens with more water. WASA’s groundwater pumps are currently running at only partial capacity due to a 1,500 megawatt shortage of power. The government hopes a new nuclear power deal with Russia will help address the energy challenge.
The two planned 1,000 megawatt nuclear plants will be critical stopgaps to address current and future demand woes. The plants, however, will only come online in 2017—little comfort for those currently without power or water. Already, as clean water stocks vanish, the Institute of Cholera and Diarrhoeal Diseases and Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B) has seen a concomitant rise in the number of people complaining of symptoms of water-borne diseases, such as diarrhea and cholera. Those affected by the shortage will have little respite, as forecasters indicate a continued heat wave for the region for the coming weeks.
Photo Credits: “Access to Clean Drinking Water”, Flickr User DFID
