Tag Archives: Cities

June 2012: A new report outlining the imperatives for London’s future success has recently been published and contains views from around 100 leading thinkers about the future of cities into the second decade of the 21st century – including the following:

“While some challenges remain as intractable as ever, others have only surfaced more recently. The major policy area which has moved inescapably to the forefront since London:World City is that of climate change. In 1991 environmental concerns were primarily limited to air pollution, sulphur dioxide emissions, noise and litter. The implications of carbon dioxide emissions for urban life and urban policy had barely registered. Today London’s carbon reduction and climate mitigation dilemmas are complex and critical. There is increasing evidence that world cities will need to introduce rigorous climate-change-oriented provision in order to meet the security and ethical demands of an increasingly environmentally conscious citizenry.”

May 2012: “A new study has explored how cities can create a low carbon future by presenting an approach to stakeholder engagement that develops scenarios of an ideal city. Rather than projecting towards a low carbon target for the future, the study suggests that ‘backcasting’ to the present day from these scenarios may provide a useful goal-orientated approach to environmental planning in cities.” Read a summary of the new study here.

May 2012: The World Bank have just published a report which focuses on Chinese cities and the need for these areas of growth to respond to the challenges of climate change. The report however also provides a comparison of London against a number of other world cities, looking at a range of low-carbon metrics (emissions per capita, CO2 intensity, energy consumption per capita and so on – see Tabl3 3.1 – pg 85) which may be of interest. The World Bank news story around the release of the report is available here, and the report itself – Sustainable low-carbon city development in China – can be downloaded here.

1 June 2011: The C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40) released two reports today that emphasize the critical role of measurement and transparency in tackling climate change in megacities.

• A measurement baseline – The first‐ever public disclosure and analysis of self‐reported community‐wide greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) data from C40 cities, showing the urban concentration of GHG emissions and climate‐related risks, highlighting the importance of City government action to reduce emissions (report by the Carbon Disclosure Project)
• A benchmark of actions C40 Cities have taken to date and an inventory of powers Cities hold over sectors, demonstrating what actions have been taken across the C40 Cities and also identifying what powers City governments across the C40 have to take further actions on mitigation and adaptation.  (report by Arup)