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.