Money pledges for World Bank would show way to meet $155tn urban climate bill

While huge amounts of brainpower and hard work are going into making #cities more #sustainable, achieving that comes down to money. New figures show a stark shortfall in the amount of global urban climate finance available.

Catastrophic weather events hitting major urban centres over the summer, such as severe flooding in east Africa and wildfires in the Amazon near Brasilia, have acted as reminder that cities are both a cause and victim of the climate emergency.

Some 4.4 billion people or 58 per cent of the world’s population live in cities, a share that is forecast to rise to seven out of 10 by 2050, while, according to the World Bank, more than 80% of global economic output is generated in cities. For both reasons policymakers believe that cities will need more finance to fund both mitigation measures and innovations to help them adapt.

The challenge is immense at a time when many lenders and donors are squeezed in the wake of multiple crises while accelerating urbanisation means that the need to both cope with climate change and invest in measures to deal with it are increasing.

Analysis published at the turn of the month by Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) shows that while the volume of urban climate finance has shown a strong increase over the last five years, it is well short of what is needed.

According to its State of Cities Climate Finance report, inflows have more than doubled between 2017 and 2022, reaching $831 billion. However, for climate mitigation alone, cities require an estimated $4.3 trillion a year between now and 2030, and more than $6 trillion annually for each of the following 20 years.

A quick bit of maths indicates a bill of some $155 trillion — and that is just to offset the impacts of climate change. This includes the cost of investing in greener  transport such as electric vehicle and urban rail systems, renewable energy, as well as energy-efficient air-conditioning, heating and cooking systems.

The CPI says that working out the financial costs of measures to help cities adapt to the impacts of climate change is much more difficult because of a lack of data. It estimates the needs in emerging and developing market economies (EMDEs) at $4.5 trillion although warns that this may be a significant underestimate.

Interestingly the CPI identifies the sources of current finance with a fifth coming from the public sector, of which most is national governments, and almost half from private finance, which includes households and individuals investing in electric cars and energy-efficient buildings.

More money, and better used

Urban climate finance therefore needs to increase fivefold over the coming years. But as with demands for money, whether within countries to respond to voters’ demand, or to tackle other global needs such as hunger and disease, it is hard to see where it will come from.

There are some gains that can be made with existing resources, such as by using existing money to meet specific needs. There is also a need to make greater use of public money to reduce the risk for other investors and thus leverage in more private finance (as the development banks have been doing for some time).

Improving the monitoring of urban climate finance and increasing access to associated data across both public and private sectors is also crucial. Organisations that report on this topic should adopt standardised classifications of urban climate finance. This would make different reporting systems more compatible and help reduce discrepancies in reporting.

But at the end of the day, it comes down to money. One source is international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which are holding their annual meetings later this month and which together with other bodies made up $26 billion or 3.1 per cent of the total in 2022.

Eyes will especially be on the World Bank, whose new president Ajay Banga has changed its stated mission to “eliminate extreme poverty on a liveable planet”, with the final phrase tacked on to ensure tackling climate change is front and centre.

Its International Development Association arm that provides zero- or low-interest rate loans to the poorest countries is at the final stages of its three-yearly replenishment. Banga is hoping he will secure enough donations for rich governments to leverage a total fund of $100 billion.

He has also worked to implement reforms of the bank’s finances to release an estimated $120 billion over the next 10 years. This only goes a small way towards the multi-trillion dollar hole, and of course only some will go towards climate change, and none will be earmarked for cities.

But the meetings are an ideal forum to raise the needs of cities, especially given the large share of the population in EMDEs that are, or will be, moving into cities. Nevertheless, ensuring that cities are more sustainable in an era of greater floods, droughts and storms will require collaboration across sectors all and between government, businesses and investors. The Bank and Fund meetings are a good place to start.

Will a pedestrian-only Oxford Street be sustainable? Research can provide an answer

Pedestrianising #London’s Oxford Street could be a major step forward in making the #city #sustainable, but it does ask as many questions as it answers. The consultation period offers as opportunity for research on past schemes.

Every now and again, leaders of a city come up with a dramatic plan to push the sustainability agenda on in a meaningful way. This can be a change in laws and taxes such as the imposition of  a congestion charge, or creating a market such as enabling bicycles to be hired at the point at which they sit on the street.

But the most longstanding and impact change comes from investment in infrastructure, as it is more permanent and much harder for a future regime to reverse. This is why networks of cycle lanes have been so influential in continental Europe and why London Mayor’s Sadiq Khan’s plan to pedestrianise Oxford Street have grabbed the headlines.

Although general traffic has been banned from the kilometre-long (0.7 mile) road for some time, the seemingly endless stream of buses and taxis make the street less than ideal for visitors to the shops that line both sides of the road.  The full pedestrianisation would aim to create what Khan calls a “beautiful public space” and he has issued images of his proposed scheme such as this.

Source: Mayor of London

Similar-sized global cities have gone down the route of banning vehicles from major thoroughfares such as Barcelona’s La Rambla and Paris’s Champs-Elysees (both cities mayors offered laudatory quotes for Khan’s announcement).  Countless small towns and cities across the UK have created central vehicle-free areas for shopping and entertainment, especially in the last 80 years following the creation of the post-wear New Towns.

Balancing trade-offs

But as with all sustainability projects, successful ones ensure they strike a balance between environmental, economic and social goals (otherwise known as planet, profit and people). Environmental benefits might come in the form of  a more pleasant place to live, work and visit while presumably also seeing a further improvement in air quality.

Economic benefits should flow to shops on the street — the New West End Company (NWECD trade body that represents 600 businesses says it will be a “major leap in unlocking [the] full potential” of the area’s retail, leisure, and hospitality sectors. These should deliver social gains for people working or passing through.

However, it does raise the potential for downsides in all three channels. The first comes from the dispersion of the traffic that currently flows down the street. There are 16 bus routes that use Oxford Street, carrying more than 200,000 passengers daily in either direction, according to a former head of London TravelWatch. Given that many are either north-south or east-west commuter routes they will need to be diverted, potentially creating traffic-filled streets elsewhere. This might create an environmental negative impact.

The people who use those buses specifically to get the shops on Oxford Street who either have no tube or car option or who are elderly or disabled will find the journey either impossible or very stressful. This would have a negative social impact. The plans might impact earnings for taxi drivers deprived of hires to and from the street, delivering an economic negative.

These issues have been overcome in the past. Buses used to circulate around Trafalgar Square but once the positive decision was taken to close the road on its northern edge in front of the National Gallery, buses now run up and down the roads to the east and West. Of course that is only a 200 metre stretch of road.

Perhaps one option would to split long routes into two — one terminating just to the north of Oxford Street and the other to its south, thus maintaining connections for those who rely on them to get to the area.

Maybe those social and diverted environmental costs will be seen as too great and an alternative idea, such as the one drawn up by Westminster City Council alongside the NWEC to add improved footways and more greening, seating and pedestrian crossings while maintaining the bus and taxi routes, might get a new hearing.

Khan’s proposal will require the establishment of a Mayoral Development Corporation (MDC) with greater planning powers, as has been used for the Olympic site in Stratford, east London, and the Old Oak and Park Royal schemes to the west. The MDC is subject to statutory consultation and consideration by the London Assembly so there will be period of debate and consultation.

This will be a great opportunity for deeper, independent research into what has worked, and not worked, in pedestrianisation schemes in towns cities both in the UK and across the world. Moulding sustainable cities requires trade-offs between the environmental, economic and social pillars, which is something that evidence-based research is well placed to identify.

Imagining how we might actually create 15-minute cities

The idea of the #15-minute-city has become subsumed in woke politics in the UK. New research takes a step back and identifies how many global #cities have key services that are accessible and how that share could be improved.

Imagine living in a city where all the services that you needed were just five minutes from where you live. Welcome to Zurich! Researchers used open source data to measure the time it would take people to access resources and services within 10,000 cities.

The study in the journal Nature Cities in September found that compact medium-sized European cities topped the table both in terms of the time taken and the share of population that reach them within quarter of an hour. After Zurich with an average journey time of just over five minutes, Milan, Copenhagen and Dublin took the next four places in both categories.

For example in the Irish capital it would take the typical resident seven and half minutes to reach transport, healthcare, education, shops and restaurants while 99.2% of Dubliners could do that within 15 minutes The cities with the longest distances to walk and the fewest people within a 15-minute radius were in the sprawling cities of the Americas and Asia. Within the 54 cities they analysed in detail, the worst was San Antonio, Texas where the average trip to key services took over 50 minutes and fewer than 3 per cent of residents only needed 15 minutes.

When looking at large, global metropolises, Europe also topped the list with Paris, Berlin, London and Athens all in the top 15 for both time needed and share of population, with 85 per cent of residents having key services within walking distance from their homes and an average time of 10 minutes or less. If you want to check your own city, the researchers have downloaded all the data into a giant global map that can be found here with the whole world split into hexagons for each neighbourhood.

The divide between Europe on the one hand and the Americas and Asia on the other is a reflection of the design principles that led to the growth of European cities over the past millennium around walking and public transport versus the car-dependency of more modern post-wear conurbations.

The online map also shows how the central and outer central of many cities are a mass of 15-minute cities thanks to the provision of services. But move to the city edges and the distances lengthen as services are harder to find. As their map of Rome shows, there is a clear “doughnut” effect in Italy’s capital.

Rome: colour code associated with the degree of accessibility

The more depressing news is that, in the researchers’ words, only a “tiny proportion” of the cities are very well positioned to become 15-minute cities. “The disparity in the local availability of services is an additional layer of difference between cities,” they write.

This raises the question as to how city planners could bring more residents within a 15-minute zone — assuming that there is not strong local opposition to achieving that. The researchers created a mathematical method to assess the degree of change required for these urban areas to improve their accessibility. Their findings revealed stark contrasts: San Antonio would need to redistribute 80 per cent of its services and facilities to achieve equitable access for all residents, whereas Paris would only need to shift 10 per cent% of its amenities to accomplish the same goal.

They went further, to ask how many new services — places of interests (POIs) in their words — would be needed for the city to be 15-minute for at least 90 per cent of its residents. Unsurprisingly spawling cities such as Atlanta and San Antonio where 50-minute walks are standard, the cost of adding enough POIs would be prohibitive. Atlanta would need more than 15 POIs per 1,000 residents, which converts to one POI for every 64 residents.

Looking ahead, however, this research points to the importance of ensuring that services are well-located when new cities are being built — as may happen under a Labour government — or when older urban areas are regenerated. Investment in public transport can also help to shorten those journeys.

This research will hopefully inspire further investigation and prompt tangible steps in city planning and policymaking as city planners seek to live up to the goals of urban sustainability that are so often citied in the visions they set out.