Climate of Our Future

Climate Crisis Coalition

Urban Planning Needs Rethink as Climate Change Looms
By Sophie Mongalvy, Agence France-Presse, August 17, 2007
“Rising sea levels, melting glaciers, floods and hurricanes: global warming means urban planners need to rethink how and where to build cities, water experts warned at a conference [World Water Week] in Stockholm this week. Almost 80 percent of the world’s population lives less than 50 kilometers (30 miles) from a coastline, a jarring fact given that one of the effects of global warming is rising sea levels, according to the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI)… According to Sunita Narain, the head of the Centre for Science and Environment in India and a prominent expert at the Stockholm conference, India is in the midst of a major urbanisation process and is experiencing a construction boom in its cities. She said urban planners needed to take advantage of the possible impact of climate change to reinvent ‘new models’ for clean, sustainable cities. Climate change is going to mean more and more uncertain events, more and more floods. There is a need to plan for the water and where it will go,’ she said, noting that until now urban planning has focused primarily on buildings and not on water. ‘We must make our cities more resilient to climate change,’ she said, stressing the need to implement ways of reducing carbon dioxide emissions to combat global warming, for example in the transport sector.”