Our Planet - Volume 2016, Issue 3, 2018

In 1996, when the United Nations held its last conference on the urban environment, Habitat II, the city of Nairobi had some 800,000 inhabitants. At that time the ride from the airport to UN Environment headquarters on the other side of the city was something of a mini-safari.

Singapore has come a long way in its journey towards sustainability. In the 1960s, Singapore was like any other developing country of that time – dirty and polluted, lacking proper sanitation and facing high unemployment. These challenges were more acute for Singapore given our constraints as a small island city-state with no natural resources.

Habitat III, the Third International Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, offers the world an exceptional opportunity to rethink the sustainability of our urban model. It is largely recognized that cities have become the main driver of economic development. Yet an analysis of the urbanization of the last two decades reveals that current urban practices are unsustainable: our cities consume 78 per cent of the world’s energy, produce more than half of all greenhouse gas emissions and consume much more land than is needed, with consequent environmental impacts.

Cities depend on their surrounding bio-physical landscape, utilising goods and services provided to urban populations from ecosystems. These include provisioning services such as food and water; regulating services such as climate and flood control; supporting services such as nutrient cycling and crop pollination; and cultural services such as connecting urban inhabitants to natural values. The health of the ecological system within and surrounding the city influences the health of the city itself. UN Environment recognises that building the resilience of urban populations depends on how climate and non-climate drivers are tackled together. The management of urban and surrounding peri-urban ecosystems has the potential to contribute significantly to the overall resilience of the city to climate change and other pressures.

Health needs to be an integral part of Habitat III, the Third UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, and of its outcome.

One November afternoon, the Portland City Council chambers were filled with men and women in suits, serious and practical. Standing out in the crowd were two middle school girls, poised but nervous. One of them, 12-yearold Isabel, walked to the testimony table and spoke: “If we don’t take action now, we will never grasp the opportunity to stop climate change. This is our future.”

Europe, Africa and Latin America now each have roughly half a billion people living in cities. In Asia, there are two billion city-dwellers. Very soon, two-thirds of the global population will be urban.

Cities are innovation hubs. They provide the setting, the stimulus and the substance for people to come together and exchange and develop new ideas. Cultural diversity, universities, informal meeting places and key pressure points spur the investigation into new approaches. Access to capital and shorter decision-making processes help the best of them become a reality. In this way, cities have spawned so many new trends.

Melbourne has just been named the World’s Most Liveable City for the sixth consecutive year. Naturally I am tremendously proud of that, but such an accolade cannot be achieved without a strong focus on sustainability. For liveability and sustainability are intrinsically linked. In particular, we do much to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Take our international award-winning Urban Landscapes Adaptation Program, concentrating on trees, water and green open space.

Remarkably, Medellin is now a global reference point for urban planning, efficient governance and social inclusion; moreover, the city has undergone a major transformation to get there. We owe this success to our people, and to working with different sectors of society: public, private and academic.

Maskbook is an artistic initiative which invites people to take an ordinary dust or pollution mask and transform it from a symbol of fear into a symbol of hope. Chinese artist and photographer Wen Fang gave the initiative its name: “In China, since we all wear masks to protect us against the pollution, we say that Facebook for us should be renamed Maskbook.”

In recent decades there has been an unprecedented increase in the proportion and number of people living in urban environments. In 2014, 54 per cent of the world's people were urban dwellers, compared to 34 per cent in 1960. This trend is expected to continue, while the global population is predicted to grow from 6.1 billion in 2000 to 9.7 billion in 2050, and the size of the urban area expected to triple within the next two decades. It is clear that cities are where our future is going to be decided. This places a large burden of responsibility on us, as administrators and decision-makers looking at how we shape our cities now and in the future.

Latin American cities are going through accelerated urbanisation and reflect high levels of inequality. The continent is the world's most urbanised developing region, with eight out of ten people living in cities. Conditions are often unfavourable for rapid expansion because of problems including poor public services, socio-economic inequality and environmental degradation. Yet these cities present opportunities for a paradigm shift in how to plan, develop and manage urban development.

Since 2014, Chile’s Ministry of Environment has focused on three objectives: identifying and addressing the climate effects of air pollution; taking a leading role on addressing short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs); and working to integrate these two concepts at both the local and global level.

In these rapidly changing times, as the effects of climate change and population growth challenge urban areas, we need a new paradigm for cities. They must be resilient to adapt and thrive.

Many cities in the developing world lack the capacity to adapt in the face of emerging climate variability, caught in a perfect storm of population growth, escalating adaptation needs, and substantial development deficits. In South Africa, these challenges have been exacerbated by a legacy of formalised racial division that has created widespread social, economic and environmental injustice.

Every 30 seconds someone dies in a road crash. That’s over 1.2 million people every year dying on the world’s roads. The World Health Organization’s Global Road Safety Report of 2015 shows that, worst still, half of these deaths are vulnerable road users – pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists. Tragically, 500 children die every day in road crashes.

I recently visited one of China's eco-cities, and was impressed by its highly efficient buildings and use of renewable energy for street lighting. However, this newly built city is struggling to attract people, largely due to lack of accessibility to public transport and its distance from jobs. The city’s urban planner told me that the isolation of this “eco-enclave” could have been avoided if a more holistic approach had been taken early in the planning stage, including considering various aspects of land management, urban services, connectivity, and jobs.

Cities are often perceived as monuments of human disregard for the natural world, the very antithesis of nature. But urban biodiversity has become a sustainability indicator and the importance of urban green governance is increasingly apparent.

In homes and workplaces, schools and hospitals, technologies such as boilers and air-conditioners consume vast amounts of energy. Indeed, half the energy buildings use is for heating and cooling and most of this comes from fossil fuels, burned in buildings’ individual boilers and in power plants on the outskirts of our cities. Citizens, cities and countries are starting to take real action to move away from this status quo to more sustainable solutions, and this monumental shift is cutting greenhouse gas emissions, cleaning our air, saving money and reducing energy imports.