User:Dma90/Climate change and cities

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Moreover, because of processes that create climate conflict, or transnational conflicts that stem from issues of climate change and resource allocation, and climate refugees, city areas are expected to grow during the next several decades, stressing infrastructure and concentrating more impoverished peoples in cities.

In both perpetuating and falling victim to the negative impacts of climate changes, urbanization remains a seminal component of attempting to combat the issue, as it is known that “Industrial transition and climate change regulation to reduce CO₂ emissions will affect employment and further influence social poverty”.

Hence, cities have a significant influence on construction and transportation—two of the key contributors to global warming emissions. This concept in turn validates research that links the global economy to global climate shifts, as it is understood that urbanization and economic development lowers air quality, detriments environmental  health, and increases “growing adverse impacts on public health and ecosystem integrity”.

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"Field of study" section:

…. on the effects of urban development and living on the environment starting as early as the 1950s. Since then, research has indicated relationships between climate change and certain side effects surrounding urbanization and contemporary economies; employment rates in cities and issues of poverty alleviation being two of the most prevalent. Studies like these indicate that given whatever correlation there may be between climate change and city environments, “Studying the mechanisms for CO 2 emission impacts on poverty-alleviation can provide important references for adapting to global climate change”. This claim is contextualized by research from various income inequality scholars that point towards “extreme income inequality” as the driver behind “spatial segregation, political power concentrated in the high-income (elite) class, and thus, uneven public resource access”.

Another national-level policy analysis done on the drylands of northern China presents the notion of “sustainable urban landscape planning (SULP)” that specifically aims to “avoid occupying important natural habitats and corridors, prime croplands, and floodplains”. The research indicates that adopting SULPs moving into the future can “effectively manage the impacts of climate change on water resource capacity and reduce water stress” not only within the northern China experimental model, but for “drylands around the world”.

"Regional and national differences" section:

Cities in different parts of the world face different, unique challenges and opportunities in the face of climate change. However, one linking factor is their inevitable adherence to “Dominant global patterns of urbanization and industrialization” which often catalyzes “large-scale modification of the drivers for hydrologic and biogeochemical processes”. Urbanization and industrialization patterns are particularly evident for regions such as Asia, Africa, and South America, regions that are currently understood as experiencing related rapid shifts in population and economic prowess.

Africa

…. pose a significant barrier to Africa's sustainable development. Much of this Urban Development is informal, with urban residents settling in informal settlements and slums often on the outskirts of cities. This phenomena poses lower income countries, many in Africa, as being ideal candidates for increases in infrastructural sustainability. A recent study found that in “countries with per capita incomes of below USD 15,000 per year (at PPP-adjusted 2011 USD) carbon pricing has, on average, progressive distributional effects” and that “carbon pricing tends to be regressive in countries with relatively higher income,” indicating that carbon taxing and shifting carbon prices might incentivize governments to shift to green energy as the baseline energy consumption method for developing peri-urban areas.

China

China currently has one of the fastest growing industrial economies in the world, and the effects of this rapid urbanization have not been without climate change implications. The country is one of the largest by land area, and so the most prominent region regarding urbanization is the Yangtze River Delta, or YRD, as it is considered “China’s most developed, dynamic, densely populated and concentrated industrial area” and is allegedly “growing into an influential world-class metropolitan area and playing an important role in China’s economic and social development”. In this way urbanization in China could be understood as intimately related to not only the functionality of their economic system, but the society therein; something that makes climate change mitigation an intersectional issue concerning more than simply infrastructure.

Historically, data has shown definitely that “climate change has been shaping the Delta and its socioeconomic development” and that such socioeconomic development in the region “has shaped its geography and built environment, which, however, are not adaptable to future climate change”. Thus, it has been stated that “It is imperative to adopt policies and programs to mitigate and adapt to climate change” in the YRD, specifically policies aimed at reducing the impact of particular climate threats based on the YRD’s geography. This includes the region’s current infrastructure in the mitigation of flood disasters and promotion of efficient energy usage at the local level.

Brazil

Areas of South America were also cited in recent studies that highlight the dangers of urbanization on both local and transnational climates, and for a country like Brazil, one of the highest populated nations in the world as well as the majority holder of the Amazon rainforest. The United Nations Development Programme highlights the Amazon rainforest as serving a "key function in the global climate systems," granted its profound usefulness in capturing CO₂ emissions. UN research has indicated that because of Brazil's climate being so intimately reliant on the health of the rainforest, deforestation measures are currently seen as having adverse effects on the rainforest's "natural adaptive capacities" towards extreme climate shifts, thus predisposing Brazil to what are expected to be increased volatility in temperature and rainfall patterns. More specifically, it is expected that if global warming continues on its current path without vast mitigation strategies being put in place, what is currently predicted to be an average 2°C increase in temperature at the global scale could actually look like a 4°C within Brazil and the surrounding Amazon region.

Issues of climate change in Brazil do not start and end at what has already been done with regards to urbanization; it is very much an issue rooted in socioeconomic contexts. Factor analysis and multilevel regression models sponsored by the U.S. Forest Service reveal that for all of Brazil, “income inequality significantly predicts higher levels of a key component of vulnerability in urban Brazilian municipalities” to flood hazards.

United States

The United States, as one of the largest industrialized nations in the world, also has issues regarding infrastructural insufficiencies linked to climate change. Take a study of Las Vegas topology as an indicator. Research that created three Land use/land cover maps, or LULC maps, of Las Vegas in 1900 (albeit hypothetical), 1992, and 2006 found that, “urbanization in Las Vegas produces a classic urban heat island (UHI) at night but a minor cooling trend during the day”. In addition to temperature changes in the city, “increased surface roughness” caused by the addition of skyscrapers/closely packed buildings in its own way were found “to have a mechanical effect of slowing down the climatological wind windfield over the urban area”. Such unnatural environmental phenomena furthers the notion that urbanization has a role in determining local climate, although researchers acknowledge that more studies need to be conducted in the field.

Clean Air Act

Since the Clean Air Act’s passing in 1963 as a landmark piece of legislation aimed at controlling air quality at the national level, research has indicated that “the mean wet deposition flux... has decreased in the U.S. over time” since its enactment. Even then, however, the same research indicated that measurements in the amounts of chemical pollutants contaminating rain, snow, and fog “follows an exponential probability density function at all sites”. Such a finding suggests that, in fact, alleged variability in rainfall patterns is the likely driving factor for the study’s seemingly promising results, as opposed to there being a clear significance stemming from the policy change. It is within this context that while beneficial, the Clean Air Act alone cannot stand as the only firm rationale for climate policies in the United States moving forward.

Green Cities, Clean Water

“Green Cities, Clean Water” is an environmental policy initiative based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that has shown promising results in mitigating the effects of climate change. The researchers on the policy have stated that despite such promising plans of green infrastructure building, “the city is forecasted to grow warmer, wetter, and more urbanized over the century, runoff and local temperatures will increase on average throughout the city”. Even though landcover predictive models on the effects of the policy initiative have indicated that green infrastructure could be useful at decreasing the amount of runoff in the city over time, the city government would have to expand its current plans and “consider the cobenefit of climate change adaptation when planning new projects'' in limiting the scope of city-wide temperature increase.