How Does A Sustainable City Affect The Environment?

Mingyue Wang Mary Dawson ENGL-1120 4/10/2018 How does a sustainable city affect the environment? Introduction It is estimated that 50% of the global population now live in cities. With this migration into large urban centers, the difficulty of meeting the needs of significant number of people becomes an ever-increasing problem. Overpopulation, excessive consumption, pollution, and depletion of resources have presented environmental and health challenges in major cities. The need has never been greater to find solutions and reimagine urban landscapes (oxfam.org np). In 1994, the Aalborg Charter was created for sustainable cities and towns, and since then cities around the world have been leading the way in innovative and integrated approaches to sustainable living. The charter calls for a commitment to urban management, sustainable local economies, responsible consumption and demands legal action for violations of health, social equity, and justice. The world is urbanizing at a rapid pace. By 2050, more than 2 billion additional people will be living in cities (United Nations np). Furthermore, the vast majority of this growth will be concentrated in developing countries, with nearly 90% of the increase from cities in Africa and Asia (Global Environment Facility np). Therefore, cities remain the best place to start addressing huge trends driving global environmental degradation, including urbanization, a rising middle class, and growth in population. As engines of economic growth, cities generate approximately 80% of the global gross domestic product (GDP). Additionally, they consume over two-thirds of world's energy supply and produce 70% of greenhouse gases (Global Environment Facility np). Cities are also uniquely vulnerable to rising ocean levels because of climate change, with 14 of the world's 19 largest cities being located in port areas. If well managed, solid, resilient, inclusive and resource-efficient cities could become drivers of the green economy that depends of environmental friendly resources such as green energy. This will contribute to both local livability and global public goods. Conversely, poor management leads to urban areas with degraded land, strained ecosystems, and essential infrastructure services, increased levels of pollution, and increased size of vulnerable populations (Global Environment Facility np). The population impact approach becomes largely irrelevant for understanding cities. It does alert us to our natural base, but it can be used to generate many rather ridiculous policy implications, from humans shifting to the ruralization of cities (Newman 276). Nonetheless, it becomes essential to seek a more expansive way of understanding cities. Population impact is largely a devastating concept since it asserts that the primary task of urban policy is to be against humans. There is little room to suggest how a city can manage its population growth, or even see it as a positive force on the impact of humans in the world. Thus, population impact is not only difficult, but of uncertain value if the goal is to reduce urban local or global effect. The primary issue around the growth of cities is ensuring that such growth is used to solve problems (Newman 277). Global and regional environmental problems are real and are significantly contributed to by cities, but stopping urban population growth is not a solution to such issues, and might even make them worse by distracting from the need to restructure and change how individuals live in cities. A more refined analysis of the impact of cities has been developed into a methodology that can calculate a city's Ecological Footprint, based on an ecological understanding of how a city extracts food, water, energy, and land from a bioregion and requires ecosystem services to absorb its wastes (Newman 280). The total resource use of a city is figured relative to its population, and the resulting calculation allows a per capita footprint of land to be compared to that of other cities. These comparisons apply in getting a sense of how much a city should be trying to reduce its full ecological impact. Large sections of the urban population in low- and middle-income nations have virtually no impact on the global environment. They use almost no non-renewable resources and few renewable resources, generate almost no waste or greenhouse gas emissions, and use no products whose production has high ecological impacts. Many people in these nations make a living recycling, and thus contribute to reducing resource flows, and have a minimal local impact (Newman 281). They may live in settlements that offend the sensibilities of wealthy people and sometimes they have serious environmental health problems. However, this is not the case with wealthy Western cities, where the global impact of local production grows each year. The attraction of cities, which continues to be at the heart of their growth, lies in the opportunities that they create through networks of people. Often, these opportunities require economies of scale and density, especially for the knowledge of economy jobs and services that are features of the twenty-first century global cities. Studies of the relationship between concentrations of people and social and health problems have never pointed to a negative connection, although the history of town planning in Anglo-Saxon traditions is based on the assumption that such a connection exists (Newman 278). On the other hand, social scientists have shown that density is not a primary variable in the creation of social problems, but it intensifies the human experience of all kinds. Human beings are adaptable to urban environments and rapidly create social support systems if given the opportunity. The combination of poverty and high density without social support frameworks is not, however, without problems. The optimum population size of cities for reaching various social goals has not yet been determined. The top four "alpha" cities of the global economy, including Paris, London, New York and Tokyo still appeal to their residents and visitors despite being large and dense (Newman 279). Sustainability assessment enables us to understand and act upon both the local and global impact of cities. By applying the sustainability criteria, a city can address both sets of issues: the "natural resources" criterion promotes attention to global and local resource issues at every step of development, while the "environment" criterion calls for the same approach to include all the global and local impacts. The other criteria enable the questions of "liveability" to be addressed at the same time, and the synergies between them to be found (Newman 286). By having an integrated set of goals guiding development, it is possible to reverse the historic trend whereby inevitably, Ecological Footprint has been growing along with improvements in the quality of life. The first signs of this decoupling can now be detected – Australian urban data, for example, are showing that it is the wealthy and educated who are using less energy and water, recycling more, eating less junk food and living in places where they can use public transport and walk more Battula and Ega 213). This is an indication of a "learning society" approach to sustainability, where the importance of ideas is stressed, and the framing of issues becomes critical to change. Sustainability assessment approaches the future by asking of any development that it produces "net benefit" in all three areas of environment, social and economic performance (Newman 286). This means that there should not be a trade-off between the three areas, as has so often been the case. It also means that the whole rationale of impact assessment is turned on its head; instead of simply seeking to reduce negative impact, it promotes development that is positive in its outcomes. This approach can and should be applied to cities. Thus, cities, as they develop, will begin to contribute positively to human and natural systems. The goal of policymakers in this arena shifts from an attempt to minimize the negative to one of seeking the positive. It means that instead of just under...