The real cause for climate change is not cities but the high-consumption lifestyles, says a new study released earlier this week in London by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).
“The tendency to identify cities as major culprits in causing climate change diverts attention from the main driver of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, namely unsustainable consumption, especially in the world’s more affluent countries,” said the paper’s author Dr David Dodman with IIED’s Human Settlements and Climate Change Groups.
Unsustainable consumers are held accountable
“In many ways, it doesn’t matter whether the consumption takes place in a city or a rural area, or in a wealthy or low-income country,” says Dodman. “Wealthy consumers with unsustainable livelihoods are one of the main driving forces of climate change.”
After having examined existing reports of emissions from cities in Asia, Latin America, North America and Europe, the paper finds that GHG emissions of city dwellers are often far smaller than the national average.
London, for an example, emitted 44.3 millions tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2006, accounting for only 8 percent of Britain’s total emissions. As regards per capita emissions, Londoners have little more than half of the national average.
Brazil’s two largest cities, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, have less than one-third of the national per capita GHG emissions average.
Many cities have surprisingly low per capita emissions, but what is clear is that most emissions come from the world’s wealthier nations, Dodman said.
“High-income countries need to take the lead in showing how a high quality of life for all individuals can be achieved without placing an unsustainable load on environmental systems,” says Dodman.
Sound urban planning is the solution
To offer a remedy, the paper has strongly urged city authorities to make it possible for urban residents to live in a more climate-friendly manner.
“Effective urban governance, urban planning, and urban management can facilitate people to live a lower-carbon lifestyle, particularly through more energy efficient housing, and more widely-used public transportation,” says Dodman.
Wealth need not imply pollution, and rather than blaming cities for climate change, policymakers should see well-planned and effectively governed cities as potential solutions, he continued.
"Tokyo has considerably lower emissions per person than either Beijing or Shanghai and this shows clearly that prosperity does not lead inevitably to greater emissions," Dodman says. "Well designed and well governed cities can combine high living standards with much lower greenhouse gas emissions."
Supply chains need greening
The study also points out that emissions from manufacturing are currently allocated to the countries in which these greenhouse gases are produced, rather than to the locations in which the finished products are purchased and used.
This issue was also highlighted in a report on rich countries’ invisible emissions, which was published recently by the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo (CICERO).
Almost half of the increase in emissions in China is due to production of exports, most of which are for western countries, says the CICERO report, entitled “Journey to world top emitter”. Rich countries are contributing to the emission increases in developing nations, but this is not accounted for in international negotiations, the report says.
“Even without taking imports into account, consumers in high-income nations generate greater carbon footprints than those elsewhere in the world,” says Dodman, adding that “when ‘embedded carbon’ is taken into account, this is likely to be accentuated even further.”
In his opinion, solving the problem is likely to require a combination of voluntary actions and policy decisions that influence the pricing of products according to their impact on GHG emissions.
To deal with emissions produced during the globalisation, low-carbon researchers have been working on schemes on how to identify, calculate and cut CO2 emissions during every stage of global supply chains, in a bid to speed up the flow of goods across boundaries in a sustainable way.
Ethical climate crisis solution advocated
Many potential solutions to cut emissions and tackle the global climate crisis are under research, based on an ethical vision that each individual on this planet has an equal carbon-emitting right.
One of these systems is the Cap and Share, which is being developed by the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability (Feasta) in Ireland.
The Cap and Share scheme seeks to provide a simple, workable and ethical economic framework to deal with climate change, on the belief that every human being has a right to an equal share of the fees that fossil fuel users would be prepared to pay for the right to discharge greenhouse gases into the global atmosphere.
Commenting on similar schemes, Dodman said that from an ethical perspective, this is clearly an appealing prospect.
“However, the existing international frameworks for measuring and reducing carbon emissions are already highly complicated, and to replicate these for individual ‘carbon-emitting rights’ is likely to be logistically impossible,” says Dodman.
But the concepts behind these suggestions ought to be taken more seriously in influencing individuals and governments to reduce GHG emissions, he added.
Copyright Dongying Wang
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