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What communities need to do to survive climate change
Shawn Dell Joyce, Copley News Service
So how can we adapt to our changing climate and prepare our communities for the weird weather to come? Change at a local government level begins with reducing emissions then preparing for drought, or deluge (depending where you’re located). We need to prepare for rising sea levels, changes in agriculture and growing seasons, and the loss of livelihoods. Luckily, there is an organization that helps local governments learn where they are vulnerable, and how to reduce the catastrophic consequences of climate change.
The ICLEI, the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, is an international association of local governments and national and regional local government organizations that have made a commitment to sustainable development. It thinks globally but acts locally to help communities. Annie Strickler, council communications director, says “you can’t just choose mitigation or adaptation strategies. They go hand-in-hand. While we’re working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, many if not all communities need to prepare for impacts that are currently happening or will happen in the years and decades to come.”
Strickler adds that it is much cheaper to adapt now, than try to catch up later or pay to clean up the consequences of not adapting.
To help local governments, the council cooperated with King County in Washington State and its Climate Impacts Group to produce a free guidebook that “takes the mystery out of planning for climate impacts by specifying the practical steps and strategies that can be put into place now.”
(2 February 2008)
The guidebook mentioned in the article is available online via ICLEI: Preparing for Climate Change: A Guidebook for Local, Regional and State Governments.
Managing Traffic in the Urban Age
Andrew C. Revkin, Dot Earth via NY Times
The human species is, at this moment, in the process of becoming a mainly urban animal after a thousand generations spent mainly in rural conditions. Many economists and sociologists see this trend as our potential salvation in a world heading toward 9 billion people, although there are some big ifs.
Urban life can be productive and satisfying and is almost always much more efficient in terms of energy and land use. Families are smaller. Incomes can rise quicker. Wealth builds from the concentration of capital and enterprise. Pollution is concentrated, too, but that makes it easier to clean up once incomes grow enough to pay for municipal services. (That hasn’t happened yet in many developing-country cities.)
Then things can kick back. Prosperity in the 21st century almost always comes with an expectation of freedom of movement, increasingly in cars, as people abandon crowded buses or balky trains. Add that to the vast flow of goods trucked through cities and you get paralysis.
I explored the problem, and solutions, in several interviews this week with experts on New York City’s traffic woes.
Gridlock already is estimated by some experts to cost New York City up to $20 billion a year in lost productivity. India’s cities are mired in traffic. China is seeing ever more millions abandon bicycles in favor of autos. We’re heading toward a world of a billion cars sometime around 2020.
(31 January 2008)
Blog by environmental reporter for the New York Times.
Time running out to fix transport, Federal government warned
Public Transport Users Association
Australia’s transport system is totally unprepared for the looming challenges of climate change, rising oil prices and urban congestion, a national coalition of transport groups warned today. In making the warning, the groups urged the federal government to fund the long-overdue expansion of urban and regional rail networks.
“The transport sector is one of the largest and fastest growing sources of carbon emissions,” said Public Transport Users Association (PTUA) President Daniel Bowen. “Greenhouse pollution from cars, trucks and planes is growing so fast that the government’s target of an overall 60% cut in emissions by 2050 will be impossible to achieve.”
The warnings are contained in a pre-budget submission[1] to the federal government from public transport user and advocacy groups from each mainland state and the ACT. The submission points to dramatically accelerating climate change, chronic traffic congestion in our major cities, and growing waistlines and oil imports resulting from car dependence.
(4 February 2008)
Walkable cities
Marty Moss-Coane, WHYY’s Radio Times
Pedestrian friendly urban planning. For the past century American cities have been designed with the car in mind. But what if planners made people the top priority, where walk-ability was the number one priority. We’ll talk about this new movement with EUGENIE BIRCH, author of The Urban and Regional Planning Reader and Co-Director of the Penn Institute for Urban Research at the University of Pennsylvania, and with CHRISTOPHER LEINBERGER a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution. His new book is the Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream.
Listen to this show via Real Audio
(30 January 2008)
Also at Podnova
Contributor Wag the Dog writes:
You can still download the MP3 of this programme from the following URL:
podcastdownload.npr.org/anon.npr-podcasts/podcast/433/510027/18544043/WHYY_18544043.mp3
