The Challenge of Cities and Climate Change
Climate change is among the most pressing challenges that the world faces today. Given current atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs), the world is already committed to significant warming.
This is a serious challenge, given the wide range of expected climate impacts on natural systems, as well as on human societies, as assessed in the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2007).
The severity of these impacts will depend in part on the outcomes of global eff orts to mitigate climate change. Yet developing countries and poor populations everywhere remain the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
Even as poverty reduction and sustainable development remain at the core of the global agenda as emphasized in the World Development Report 2010: Development and Climate Change climate change threatens to undermine the progress that has been achieved to date (World Bank 2010a).
Urbanization is a defining phenomenon of this century. Developing countries are at the locus of this transformation, as highlighted in the World Bank’s 2009 Urban Strategy. It is often repeated that more than half of the world’s population is now urban.
Most of the population of industrialized countries is urban, with numerous developing countries, particularly in Latin America, also highly urbanized (UN 2010). Many developing countries in other regions of the world are following the same path. This transformation represents a challenge, but also a huge opportunity.
The World Development Report 2009: Reshaping Economic Geography (World Bank 2009) framed this in a new paradigm: to harness the growth and development benefits of urbanization while proactively managing its negative effects.
Cities concentrate wealth, people, and productivity, but they also concentrate vulnerability to natural disasters and to long-term changes in climate. Rising sea levels will affect millions of people living in coastal cities. Similarly, migration, changes in land use, and spatial development are likely to increase the vulnerability of populations to changes in weather and climatic conditions.
Adaptation to climate change is therefore an imperative for cities, as it is for the world at large.
The urgency of this challenge is also evident when considering
the massive investments in buildings and infrastructure that cities in developing countries will undertake in the coming years, which will lock in urban form
and structure for many decades thereafter.
