"The Future Of Our Cities Lies
In Their Integration With The Environment”
By Interview With Daniel Lerch
Interviewed By Emanuele Bompan
25 February, 2010
Postcarbon.org
Original article in Italian by Emanuele Bompan, Terra News, published February 9, 2010.
A conversation with Daniel Lerch, author of Post Carbon Cities: Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty, to understand how we can build cities that are resilient to climate change and able to meet their own energy needs without depending on oil.
Cities, peak oil production and climate change are intimately related. Today, cities are where more than half of the world’s population lives, and are responsible for 40% of greenhouse gas emissions. According to climate scientists, economists and urban geographers, cities are also where climate change and energy crises related to the peak production of fossil fuels will have devastating effects. Water shortages, soil salinization, changes in ecosystems and food production, floods and droughts caused by climate change will inevitably change the structure of cities. Terra News met with Daniel Lerch, author of Post Carbon Cities: Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty, to discuss how governments must act to address the future challenges of building cities that are resilient to climate change.
In your book, you point out the urgent need to rethink cities as independent of fossil fuels and pay increased attention to the possible threats of climate change. Why?
The priority today is to create "post carbon communities"—communities whose goal is to become resilient in a world of energy and climate uncertainty. Communities must do much more than simply reduce greenhouse gas emissions and plan for "sustainability". The time has come to build cities that can face the looming economic, social or environmental impacts of peaking global oil production and worsening climate change.
So what can be done?
There are no simple solutions. Each community has its own unique economic, social and political context, so there is no single approach. Today, many municipalities have cut fuel use and have revolutionized how they do planning. It is especially important to adopt "best practices" in sustainability technologies like green building and energy efficiency, and to understand which technologies can work and which cannot in particular locations.
I always recommend that cities not have just reducing emissions as their primary objective. Reducing emissions is fundamental, but we must also support the energy needs of urban centers. The first thing that cities must do is perform a careful analysis of the vulnerabilities and opportunities they'll face in a future where oil significantly more expensive (say, $200 per barrel) oil and and where climate change is having visible effects on the economy, agricultural production, regional water supplies, and social justice. By understanding which are their unique weak areas, individual communities can take a more sensible approach. Better for a community to spend two years building a solid, comprehensive action plan for the specific energy and climate challenges they'll face over the next twenty years than for them to focus just on reducing emissions, only to find out later that their more immediate challenges have become more urgent and more expensive to address.
Today we talk about urban planning for climate mitigation (containing emissions) and for adaptation (adapting cities to phenomena such as water scarcity, rising sea levels, and energy shortages). How do you think communities should approach these needs?
In general, I believe that communities should focus on adaptation, that is, on how the regional climate will change and how that will affect regional water supplies, food production, public health, and social and economic needs in general. At the global level, it is absolutely important to reduce emissions. But at the local level, the impact of emissions is indirect, so it is less important to the local economy and social structures than problems resulting from climate and energy shortages, which would have immediate, direct and catastrophic effects. Let’s say that a city successfully reduces emissions by 10% between 2010 and 2015, but then suddenly finds itself in the midst of a global energy crisis, completely unprepared. There would be dramatic social and economic consequences, especially if this happened at the same time as disasters caused by climate change. By having focused only on cutting emissions, this city has created serious problems for its citizens, while having done little to solve global warming. Instead, it is important to reach an agreement on emissions at the national and international levels. The tools available to national governments and global markets are more efficient for stopping climate change than are millions of local bylaws.
Transportation is the key to adapting cities to a future constrained by energy shortages and climate change. The golden rule is to optimize resources. Cars use an absurd amount of resources to move goods and people. To move one person, we must also move an object that weighs several tons, while using non-renewable energy. Using all that energy just to go to work or go shopping is simply stupid.
Translated for Post Carbon by Lucy Segatti
