Advertisement
Canada markets open in 3 hours 43 minutes
  • S&P/TSX

    21,837.18
    -12.02 (-0.06%)
     
  • S&P 500

    5,149.42
    +32.33 (+0.63%)
     
  • DOW

    38,790.43
    +75.63 (+0.20%)
     
  • CAD/USD

    0.7364
    -0.0025 (-0.33%)
     
  • CRUDE OIL

    82.43
    -0.29 (-0.35%)
     
  • Bitcoin CAD

    86,255.20
    -6,095.91 (-6.60%)
     
  • CMC Crypto 200

    885.54
    0.00 (0.00%)
     
  • GOLD FUTURES

    2,156.20
    -8.10 (-0.37%)
     
  • RUSSELL 2000

    2,024.74
    -14.58 (-0.72%)
     
  • 10-Yr Bond

    4.3400
    0.0000 (0.00%)
     
  • NASDAQ futures

    18,196.00
    -35.50 (-0.19%)
     
  • VOLATILITY

    14.54
    +0.21 (+1.47%)
     
  • FTSE

    7,719.22
    -3.33 (-0.04%)
     
  • NIKKEI 225

    40,003.60
    +263.20 (+0.66%)
     
  • CAD/EUR

    0.6789
    -0.0003 (-0.04%)
     

How cities around the world are protecting billions of people from climate change

Beijing
Beijing

Experts have often pointed out that, when it comes to fighting climate change, the world’s cities have both special risks and special opportunities. Climate change has the potential to bring down a hailstorm of consequences on urban areas, including flooding, public health risks and economic collapse.

So protecting the billions of people who live in these places — more than half the global population, and growing — is a big concern for world leaders.

But new research suggests that the global community may need to do more to make sure its most vulnerable populations are being protected.

ADVERTISEMENT

SEE ALSO: Here's where climate activists are setting their sights in 2016

Many cities around the world are already taking measures to adapt to the future impacts of climate change. Designing better drainage systems, increasing energy and water use efficiency, improving transportation infrastructure and developing better disaster preparedness plans are all ways cities are starting to bolster themselves for the future. There’s even a global network for cities committed to addressing climate change, called the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group.

The problem is that not all cities around the world have the same resources to allocate toward climate preparedness. And until now, there have been few analyses of how cities in different parts of the world, with different resources, have been responding to the issue. Now a new study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change this week, takes a look at resilience efforts around the world and how they compare to one another.

“The underlying thing that we were looking to achieve in this project was to create a baseline for measuring whether action to adapt to climate change in different cities around the world is improving or not, and whether there are any disparities between cities,” said the new study’s lead author, Lucien Georgeson, a doctoral researcher in the University College London’s geography department.

Not all cities are equal

Georgeson and his colleagues selected 10 cities from around the world to analyze in their study: London, Paris, New York, Mexico City, Jakarta, Lagos, Addis Ababa, Sao Paulo, Beijing and Mumbai. 

The selection criteria dictated that each one be a megacity — meaning it either has a population of more than 3 million or a gross domestic product (GDP) in the top 25 of cities worldwide (or both) — as well as a C40 member.

Additionally, the cities represent a diverse set of geographic regions around the world, including Europe, North and South America and various regions of both Asia and Africa. They also have different climates, face different types of risks and exist at differing levels of socioeconomic development.

The researchers then analyzed the ongoing climate adaptation efforts in each city between 2009 and 2015, or what they call the “adaptation economy.” This essentially refers to the total amount that cities spend on sectors that fall under the category of climate change adaptation and resilience, including health, energy, water, disaster preparedness, the natural environment and the built environment.

The biggest trends in their findings lay in the differences between cities in developing nations versus developed ones. In general, cities in developed nations all spend around 0.22 percent of their total GDP on climate adaptation, whereas cities in developing nations all spend about 0.15 percent.

The notable outlier was Beijing, which spends about 0.33 percent of it GDP on adaptation — more than any other city in the study. This likely has to do with the exceptional policy framework kept in place by the Chinese central government over the past decade, Georgeson said, with a high emphasis on developing and delivering climate adaptation plans in each of the country’s provinces.

The researchers also examined the amount spent versus the size of each city’s population and found that cities in developed nations generally spent more per capita. The highest of these was Paris, at about $550 per capita. In contrast, Addis Ababa spends about $6.50 per capita.

The researchers also observed that cities at differing development stages tended to prioritize different types of adaptation activities. While the patterns here were somewhat less clear-cut, the researchers observed that developing cities devote somewhat greater proportions of their adaptation economies to agriculture, forestry and the natural environment. Beijing was an outlier again in this case; along with New York, Paris and London, it spends a greater proportion on energy, water and professional services.

The researchers note that money spent on disaster preparedness is lower in developing cities, although it’s notable that this sector accounts for the smallest proportion of the adaptation economy in all of the cities studied.

What's the priority?

There are mixed conclusions to be drawn from all of these observations.

“The overall picture, I think, is the broadly positive trend when it comes to adaptation in climate change,” Georgeson said. Almost all of the cities in the study experienced growth in their adaptation economies between 2009 and 2015, which Georgeson said is “a broadly positive sign that things are probably moving in the right direction.”

However, the researchers also point out that the differences in adaptation responses, both as a function of GDP and population size, may suggest that cities’ current adaptation responses are prioritizing the protection of physical capital (things in the city that have “economic or insurable value,” according to Georgeson) rather than the people in the cities. In simple terms, richer cities have more assets to protect, so there may be a greater incentive for them to invest more in climate resilience.

But even Georgeson acknowledged that this is likely a simplification. “There seems to be evidence beyond just that some cities are richer, some cities are poorer,” he said. “There’s evidence there’s a difference in how that money is being allocated.”

It’s likely that cities at different stages of development just have different priorities. Developing cities, for instance, may have a greater urgency in strengthening the parts of their societies related to basic services, and so allocate more resources to sectors like agriculture or health.

“On the other side of that… there’s some evidence that developed countries’ cities have a different challenge, with their higher proportional spend on energy and water,” Georgeson suggested, noting that these priorities may be related to the complex, and often aging, energy and water infrastructures in such places.

In fact, the unique challenges and goals of individual cities should be taken into greater account in future related research, said Lawrence Susskind, a professor of urban and environmental planning at MIT and a vice chair at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

Without concrete estimates of the specific climate risks each city is facing, it’s impossible to know for sure whether a city is spending its money in ways that respond to the most serious dangers, he noted. Thus, we can’t assume from this study that the money allocated to any given sector is “money spent wisely.” We also can’t assess whether a city’s spending allocations are addressing that city’s specific adaptation goals without knowing what those goals are in the first place.

“Looking at [the] total [a] city spend[s] on adaptation, even averaged over time on a per capita basis, doesn’t reveal whether a city is responding to the most pressing risks it faces,” Susskind said via email. “Coastal cities face very different risks from inland cities. Riverine cities face very different climate-related risks than cities that have no rivers. What we really want to know is whether each city has developed down-scaled climate risk assessments and what these say.”

And Georgeson agreed that acquiring such information will be an important next step for follow-up research.

It's not about shaming

“[Until now] it was hard to have a sense of what cities are spending on and where,” Georgeson said. “And the next step is to look at what risk profiles cities are facing and whether what’s being spent is going out towards those risks.”

He stressed that the study’s purpose has “never been about trying to name and shame the cities.”

Rather, he added, “it’s always about looking at whether the cities have enough resources to adapt and trying to understand how the adaptational responses vary between different cities and regions, and therefore think about what governments and institutions in the global community need to do to make sure people are sufficiently protected from climate risk.”

Accomplishing this goal will require not only a much better knowledge of individual cities’ climate risks, but also the specific needs of the diverse populations living within them, Susskind suggested.

“Without widespread public engagement in adaptation planning, following a period of public education, I worry that cities won’t set adaptation goals in a self-aware way,” he added. “Only through a transparent process involving extensive public dialogue will the needs of the poor and most vulnerable residents (and not just the owners of the most expensive properties) be given fair consideration.”