The Future of Cities
The 21st century will come to be known as the urban century. For the first time in human history more than half of the 6.8 billion people on Earth live in cities. Over the next 17 years, another 1.7 billion people will join our species – what I call homo urbanis. Canada is no different. In 1867, 20 per cent of Canadians lived in cities; now over 80 per cent do.
As such, getting cities right, and making them as sustainable as possible, is fundamentally important to our survival. Overconsumption of scarce natural capital (water, soil, forests, the ocean’s bounty, oil and gas, coal, minerals) causes major environmental problems – foul air, contaminated water and soil, deforestation and desertification, loss of biodiversity, climate change from human-produced greenhouse gases.
This is largely an urban problem. The vast majority of the planet’s natural resources are consumed by city-dwellers – by their homes, transportation, energy, food, clothes, businesses, industries, and governments. A smaller but still significant portion of our natural capital is eaten up by mines, mills, farms, and other rural industrial activities that produce products used primarily by city-dwellers.
North American cities are by far the worst offenders. If China and India’s rapidly urbanizing population of 2.5 billion consumed natural capital the way we do in Canadian and U.S. cities, we would need the equivalent of four Earths’ worth of natural resources. As we only have one Earth, it’s imperative that we imminently abandon our North American urban model of sprawl, freeways, SUVs, and general overconsumption.
Besides their considerable impact on the environment, 21st-century cities constitute a crucial front in the war against poverty. One billion poor people currently live in urban areas of developing countries, many of whom are forced to inhabit informal and mostly illegal slums. Many more will have to adopt such living conditions if we don’t develop creative, sustainable strategies for building modern cities.
The impact of cities on the world today and over the next century cannot be overstated. Thus, in an effort to build strategies for creating sustainable cities and to conceive of the tools necessary to implement them, I have invited a group of experts to discuss various aspects of the broad subject of cities: ecological footprints, climate change, demographic challenges, social welfare, and more. I hope you will join in the dialogue.
Living Beyond Our Means
by William Rees
Ecologist and ecological economist; Professor, University of British Columbia.
- First Posted: Oct 16 2009 11:50 AM
- Updated: 8 months ago
North America's ecological footprint is four times larger than its fair share. As the rest world gets richer, something will have to change.
Continuous population growth is impossible. Even if it weren’t, more people would only complicate most of the problems the world is already facing. Everyone knows this, but it’s politically incorrect to discuss the matter, so the “population problem” is usually ignored.
Much the same can be said about continuous economic growth. Admittedly, this issue is a bit more complicated. Deep down, everyone – except maybe old-style economists – knows that infinite material growth in a finite space is unattainable, but the same “everyone” is so dependent on this idea to keep them employed, to grow their investments, and to ensure a comfortable retirement that it’s also impolite to question the growth economy. The relatively sensible concept of a “steady state” economy has therefore never even been on the mainstream radar.
It should be. Every person on Earth requires a certain minimum amount of biocapacity just to stay alive, and a whole lot more if they aspire to “the good life.” The problem is that biocapacity is in limited supply and, if anything, that supply is decreasing. This means that everyone on the planet is competing with everyone else for a slice of a shrinking ecological pie.
Check out any good resource atlas. You’ll find that there are only about 13.5 billion hectares of cropland, grasslands, forests and ocean that are ecologically productive enough to supply human demands for resources and waste sinks. The population of Earth is 6.7 billion people, so an equitable allocation of available biocapacity would see everyone on the planet enjoying the productivity and assimilative capacity of about two hectares each.
But wait a minute – isn’t North America’s per capita ecological footprint already nine hectares, more than four times its fair share, and growing? The more efficient Europeans and Japanese need only five hectares per capita to maintain their consumer lifestyles but they’re still two and a half times over the top. Meanwhile, the world’s poorest citizens (think Malawi or Bangladesh) subsist on as little as half a hectare each.
In the great global competition for biocapacity, those with the most money and power win. The richest 20 per cent of the world’s population take home 76.5 per cent of its income. This enables many high-income countries to import two to several times their domestic biocapacities through trade, and dump their wastes into the global commons (think carbon emissions). Rich nations today achieve through globalization what used to require colonialism.
The problem is that the wealthy fifth of humanity already claim most of the available biocapacity in certain categories – all of its carbon-sink capacity, for example. And the world as a whole is in overshoot, using more bio-output than the ecosphere produces each year and drawing down essential natural capital. The wealthy are stepping on a lot of other people’s eco-footprints!
To bring just the present world population up to North American material standards sustainably would require three to four additional Earths. Conversely, to live sustainably with equity on the only planet we’ve got, would require that North Americans reduce their eco-footprints by up to 80 per cent. This would create the necessary “ecological space” needed for justifiable growth in the developing world. I wonder if this has anything to do with why the well-to-do prefer the impossibility of continuous growth?
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