Urban areas seek cash and tech to activate a safer, greener future
Urban areas seek cash, tech to support plans for a greener future
● As 1.4-million people move to cities each week, local abilities to keep residents safe can become strained, the UN secretary-general has warned.
“The answer is to build resilience to storms, floods, earthquakes, fires, pandemics and economic crises,” said Antonio Guterres in a message for World Cities Day on Wednesday.
Cities are already pressing on with that work, he said.
Bangkok has built underground tanks to store excess rainfall and prevent floods, while Johannesburg inhabitants are joining in efforts to improve public spaces.
As urban areas sucked in 55% of the planet’s population — a figure UN estimates say will rise to 68% by 2050 — the need to find new ways to cope with modern-day pressures such as climate change has become more acute.
But it involves far more than dodging disasters, experts said.
“Investment in resilience isn’t just about avoiding losses and keeping bad things from happening, it’s about catalysing growth and opportunity,” said Marc Forni, lead specialist for urban resilience at the World Bank.
“One of the things that makes urban resilience an exciting topic is that it’s quite entrepreneurial — you have interesting innovation from all different areas,” he said.
While the tool kit of solutions for cities is expanding fast, deployment can hit financial, political and other barriers.
The US-based 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) network, backed by the Rockefeller Foundation, has spent five years assisting its cities to craft strategies for dealing with physical, social and economic challenges.
About half its members — from Buenos Aires and New Orleans to Paris and Amman, Jordan — have completed their plans, with the rest expected by the end of 2019.
“What’s harder is to help cities take that next step, which is actually doing things,” said Michael Berkowitz, president of 100RC, which now aims to link cities with the partners and resources they need to implement their strategies.
Municipalities often struggle to prepare bankable projects that can tap into financial markets, he and others said.
“There’s a ton of interest … from big commercial banks to impact funds — billions and billions of dollars are wanting to invest in green things,” said Todd Gartner, director of the World Resources Institute’s natural infrastructure initiative.
But private investors often shied away, seeing the risks as too high, he said.
Berkowitz said cities would need support in the form of project design and finance structuring to bridge the gap.
Cities can also achieve a lot by reallocating their existing resources, and finding new ways to raise money.
For example, New Zealand’s quake-prone capital, Wellington, screens its budget to
What makes urban resilience exciting is that it’s quite entrepreneurial
Marc Forni
Lead specialist for urban resilience at the World Bank
maximise the resilience benefits of its spending, and its electricity utility recently levied a surcharge to upgrade the power network against disasters, Berkowitz said.
In Africa, some cities are making progress on mobilising money for better infrastructure — whether green bonds issued by South African cities, or Kenyan water utilities accessing commercial loans.
Yet many cities in Sub-Saharan Africa lacked the resources to improve services and reduce environmental risks for residents, particularly in slums, said Sarah Colenbrander of the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development.
As well as tiny municipal budgets, they often suffer neglect by the central government, which has traditionally focused on larger voter bases in rural areas.
Political tensions can also hamper efforts to tackle urban poverty and infrastructure deficits, as opposition to the ruling party tends to foment in African cities, she said.
“If you starve [cities] of basic infrastructure and basic services, then you only get the costs of that population density and none of the benefits,” she said.
The region that had made the largest leaps in resilience in the past 10 to 20 years was Latin America, experts said. Robert Muggah, co-founder of the Brazil-based Igarape Institute, said conditions had been ripe for Latin American cities to act as a “laboratory”, given the area’s swift urbanisation.
The proportion of the region’s population living in cities jumped from about 40% to 80% between 1950 and 2015, UN data says.
Mayors and urban planners had to react fast with limited resources but enjoyed the freedom to experiment, as countries shifted from dictatorship to democracy and devolved power downwards, Muggah said.
Cities like Brazil’s Curitiba and Medellin in Colombia experimented with integrated public transport to better connect outlying slum neighbourhoods with workplaces and public housing programmes.
Latin American officials have been less motivated to act on longer-term climate change impacts, but the political focus is likely to shift as climate stresses grow, he added.