Will cities benefit from World Bank climate deal?

The World Bank and nine multilateral development banks agreed a breakthrough collaboration agreement and the Bank’s annual meetings in Marrakech with a strong focus on climate change. The need to focus on cities was not mentioned but a key paper published by an environmental thinktank that was part of the gathering put the issue into sharp focus.

In a week when Hamas’s assault on Israel and the latter’s retaliation added to the ongoing woes of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the recent earthquake in Morocco, the agenda of the Marrakech annual meetings of the IMF and Bank were bound to be affected.

Nevertheless, environmental organisations were keen to join the thousands at the gathering to keep up the pressure to ensure that richer countries meet their promises to provide funding to poorer nations keen to fund measures to tackle rising global temperatures.

They got some reward on Friday 13 October when 10 development banks led by World Bank president Ajay Banga unveiled a collaboration pact that included an ambition to “align our financing flows with the goals of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change”. Many a slip ‘tween cup and lip and there was, disappointingly no announcement on extra financing, but it is a start.

Although as I said two weeks ago, the issue of sustainable cities was not on the meetings’ agenda, it was on the fringes. The International Institute of Environmental Development (IIED), whose director of shaping sustainable markets Laura Kelly I meet in Marrakech, published a blog looking at how economic growth is putting communities at risk that live near major river deltas.

Written by the lead author of a more detailed peer-reviewed research article, it makes some very points that will be of interest to environmentalists, economists and urban scholars.

Using a large dataset, the authors found that the world’s major deltas are not only densely settled and built-up, but have been experiencing especially high population growth in recent decades.

It looked at settlement patterns in adjacent coastal delta that were less than 10 metres above sea level. Despite taking up a tiny fraction of the world’s land mass (0.4%), they of the world’s land, they account for about 4% of its population (279 million people) and 3% of its built-up area (23,000 km2).

It is no surprise. Therefore, that these areas are densely populated with over 600 people per square kilometre compared to an average of just 50 people on average. Not only that but those populations are growing with urbanisation rates twice that of other coastal and non-coastal areas.

Their access to waterways has historically made these areas popular because of the opportunities for exploiting economic growth and wealth. The concern is that these low lying coastal areas are at risk from the worsening impacts of global climate change for example thanks to more frequent and severe flooding and storms, and long-term sea level rise.

As the paper warns: “The same coastal deltaic locations that once gave them an economic edge may eventually spell their downfall.” But stopping and reversing that trend is hard. Encouraging or forcing people to move away from these areas will impact disadvantaged groups whose livelihoods will suffer from a forced move.

So what to do? The first step is to take measures to discourage future development in the delta land areas. Planners must ensure that climate change impacts are taken into account when approving future projects – something was not done during the significant expansion in coastal settlements in the years either side of the new millennium. This should involve both providing a platform for negotiating the right forms of protection, and applying the right brakes to risky development.

Secondly, policymakers will need make concerted – but also socially equitable - efforts to guide urban development towards safer locations will also be important. While this will need to be driven locally, the enormous scale of the challenge means they will need to be supported both nationally and internationally.

Given that standout areas for this low elevation developments and emerging markets and developing countries (EMDCs) in eastern Asia and Africa, the World Bank and their partner bodies for those regions (the Asian Development Bank and the African Development Bank) will have to play a key role.

Mr Banga said(LINK) the agreement could potentially yield an “additional lending headroom” in the order of $300 to $400 billion over the next decade, it is essential that EMDC policymakers push for financial support to be diverted to support their efforts to reduce the climate impact of coastal delta developments.

Defining a sustainable city is tricky…but important

Although it is a simple question, to ask “what is a sustainable city” will likely prompt a response reminiscent of Bill Clinton. What do you mean by sustainable? And what do you mean by city? Frustrating as it is, these definitions are vital to delivering on the agenda of progressive urban development.

It seems that everything is “sustainable” these days. Clothing, furniture, jobs, electronics, energy —and of course cities —can be dropped into the sustainable basket as if that gives it a premier aroma. But what does it mean?

My admittedly ageing Chambers Dictionary from 1998 gives the definition as “involving the long-term use of resources that do not damage the environment”, which gives it both a green tinge and a pointer towards future-facing obligations.

But how does one apply that to cities? Some 35 years ago, the United Nations’ World Commission on Environment and Development that was brough together amid a growing “concern for the environment”, issues a decent first version,

The document, also known as the Brundtland report after its chairman, then Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, defined it as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Thos focus on need reflecting a concern primarily about poverty in what was then known as the “third world”.

Given that the focus of the report was the integration of economic, social, and environmental concerns together with the awareness that urbanisation was set to accelerate particularly in the Global South, that cities would and should become the focus of sustainable development initiatives.

After much debate in academic the Rio Declaration of 1992 which was part of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, that integrated the three pillars of sustainability, economic, social, environmental, with the idea of governability.

This effectively means fostering urban planning and environmental management, which includes the reduction of ecological footprint, and the decentralization of decision-making and resource allocation, as well as enhanced policy coordination between local and national authorities. In other words, goals for what should be achieved but also how to go about it.

The next challenge is to decide what a city is. For people in the UK, there is an easy — albeit odd — definition, which is any city with a cathedral or university and any town bestowed with city status by the Crown. This means Ely (population 19,189) is a city, but Dudley in the West Midlands (320,320) is not.

In the US anything can be a city, as Tina Turner’s song Nutbush City Limits about an incorporated community in Tennessee with a population of 259 people shows. In Zambia, urban areas refer to the calendar of 5,000 people, while India’s 2011 census showed that the rural population counts for 69% and the urban population 31%.

Clearly administrative boundaries will not help. That is also true for another reason, that the environmental impact of a city does not stop at its edge. As Hugo Lefebvre, the French sociologist said in his book The Urban Revolution, the city is an inappropriate scale to think about urbanization because the urban fabric and the urban logic expands beyond the boundaries of the city as a kind of administrative entity.

One obvious example is that a city will effectively import environmentally harmful activities through the amount of goods produced from elsewhere in the country or from other countries.

This concept has become codified by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol that defines corporate emissions as Scope, 1,2 and 3 with the last of those covering their entire value chain both upstream and downstream. According to carboncityfootprints.info, for large and high-income cities, their total Scope 3 footprint is much larger than the city's direct emissions.

Decades of academic research and input from conferences coordinated by the United Nations means that we have working definitions for sustainability and how cities should be seen in that debate. But that is just the starting point for a wider debate about what policies should be put in place to foster urban sustainability, who will pay for those investments, and how we can measure the results. All subjects for future blogs.

Sustainable cities must be in the crosshairs of the World Bank and IMF

Making cities sustainable is a vital ingredient in meeting the goals of reducing harmful emissions and lowering temperatures that the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have put into their missions. But will that receive the coverage and focus it needs at the multilateral financial institutions annual meetings in Morocco in October?

More than half of humanity lives in cities and, by the year 2050, two-thirds of us — 6.5 billion people — will be urban creatures. Unless international, national, regional and local policymakers drive change in the way we manage our conurbations, achieving sustainable development will be an uphill battle.

Climate change will be front and centre when the ministers and central bankers from the 190 members of the World Bank and IMF gather for their annual meetings in Marrakech between 9 and 14 October, but through their different lenses. For the Bank, climate change is an impediment to its goal of ending poverty, while for the Fund it makes it harder for poor, countries to run a robust economy.

The incoming World Bank president Ajay Banga has forged a new slogan for the bank — a world free of poverty on a liveable planet. His counterpart at the IMF Kristalina Georgieva has described climate change as macro-critical and identified for financial instruments such as debt for climate swaps.

Sadly, sustainable cities will not be given separate treatment during the six days of the meetings unlike other equally important issues such as debt, poverty, unemployment, gender balance, and climate change in general. The two leaders will at least, however, be on a joint panel to explore innovative ways countries improve people’s quality of life through policies that accelerate low-carbon and resilient growth.

That is not to say that the issue will not feature as policymakers, analysts, NGOs and the media debate how to deliver robust economic growth while still contributing towards meeting the United Nations’ targets.

As the world’s premier development bank, the World Bank is more vocal on this issue with its own sustainable cities blog, an initiative and a global platform. But the Bank and its sister IFI must use the weekes following the annual metings to ensure that it shows it has got the ambition of supporting sustainable cities in their sights.