What *is* the Urban Climate Problem?

[sameershisodia]

A lot of our partners have been working on Urban issues, and there’s a very good understanding of many facets of the problem - water, sanitation, transportation, air quality (to some extent), etc. More recently a few have gotten together to explore if the urban/rural dichotomy is a hard line. Many are coming together to respond to state needs as a collaborative.

As all this happens, I was thinking about how all of this moves needles. And indeed, what needles. City planning has long been about services delivered to its citizens, and not about larger questions about the relationship with the hinterland, with nature and the planet.

So, open question : from the climate, biodiversity perspective, what do the chases and markers of a more climate resilient, climate responsible city look like? How do we know we’re collectively making progress, beyond measuring the rollout of well-intentioned and thought through plans? We just read today that cities are responsible for 70% of the emissions in India. Add waste water, waste and the indirect responsibility for a lot of structures and methods that lead to adverse outcomes elsewhere too. What needs to change in these?

Scope 1/2/3 emissions, energy, materials accounting?
Water balance?
Materials balance?
Emissions inventory, apportionment?
Biodiversity and habitat?

What are the real ways in which we can say for sure we’re moving needles on this? At what granularity should be start measuring and accounting for these?

[Suman_Jile]

There are multiple ways to tackle this problem:

At citizen level: truth-seeking
Start by reading the first chapter (or something similar) of "Samaaj, Sarkaar, and Bazaar" because till the time cities’ residents lack a systematic understanding of many of the fundamental daily necessities, it will be almost impossible to bring that empathy. let’s guess what % of residents living in Bangalore know - the source of their drinking water. Many of us are conscious about not using tissue paper because we know it is made from trees.

You will see, that many of them will not believe that they have subconsciously created a net -ve in the ecosystem.

At the system level: Simplified Narrative building that can educate residents at scale
Create scalable narratives again a simplified version that could be understood by everyone rather the sophisticated and complex. Self-realization is probably the best way to change human behaviour.

Create Incentive: Because incentive drives humans behaviours
It would demand a tight collaboration between public and private (PPP kind of model).

Note 1: Think about solving this problem from the mindset that residents are at level 0. (No scope for assumptions).
Note 2: Take only one problem at a time.

[Smita]

From a climate perspective, the built environment has a crucial role in terms of emissions, apart from transport, industry, biodiversity, water and waste. The model of development in cities - both for transport and buildings determines a very significant share of urban emissions. While we track electricity use in commercial and residential buildings, and more recently, there are efforts to understand embodied emissions from building materials, there is a need for thinking how current urban development models are locking us into increased energy use patterns, and what can be done about it beyond master plans.

From a resilience perspective, cities will grapple with extreme heat events, which are expected to increase in intensity, duration and frequency. I want to particularly highlight the quality of low income / social housing within this context, and the need to think about it as a possible metric for measuring climate resilience in cities.

[sameershisodia]

To be very honest, we’re struggling with a clear thesis in terms of imagining what needles might be moved. Of course, there’s a lot of incremental stuff, and the usual and much needed focus on improving efficiencies, governance capacities, water management, waste management, non motorized and public transport prioritization, green-blue space, flood mapping, heat and climate action plans, etc - and many of these are part of the solution to adpatation etc directly.

But a few questions (from a climate/ecology/biodiversity lens) that have stubbornly remained unanswered through all the great work:

• How does it all start to come together? Multiple individual efforts on multiple plans can not only become inefficient, but in the material and energy sense, also counter productive. Larger budgets, goals on each looked at in a separate silo - these can expand the use of cement, steel, the energy expended on these, and very often, paved areas.
• The huge focus on better service delivery coupled with an imagination of the city rooted in older methods, and uniform across different types and sizes of the city could lead to similar outcomes. E.g. has Delhi’s vast (and unit-efficient) metro network increased overall urban commute and transport distances like crazy?
• What responsibility does/can a city take? Ecologically, economically? Where does this show up, beyond the narrative?
• Who does the city belong and respond do? Does it include the transient, the distant, the non human?
• Are various motivations and consensus showing up in how a city thinks of and measures itself? Say, the scope 2/3 emissions responsibility? The trade-off made in that as Bangalore attempts to take that responsibility through water while also sourcing more fighting gravity?
• Who owns the city and all of the above questions? Each department, each civic org is focused on excelling on a few bits at most, and despite doing a great job when that happens, inadvertently accrues material/energy debt elsewhere?

If you have thoughts, do share. Happy to also get on a call and even try and system-map it deeper on a whiteboard. Really trying to figure out (if there are) key levers that can unlock a different direction in a substantial way, or if this is a tough one overall and we can “only do what we can”

Hopefully there’s more clarity out there and we’re just unable to spot these key levers and how they add up to substantial shifts wrt climate resilience, adaptation and eventually mitigation, and we’ll learn that through this and 1x1 conversations.

[maitreya]

Hi. First post on here though I’ve interacted with Rainmatter grantees in various ways, signed up to think through some of these prompts aloud. Thanks for these provocations.

I think there’s a lot to learn from the COVID relief responses in terms of scales of responses to a crisis that requires coordinated action. Of course one could argue that COVID is/was “acute” and climate change is “chronic” in the sense that it’s going to have periodic flashpoints as well as slow-burn kinda dynamics, and that therefore you can’t really compare the two.

I’m not. I’m suggesting there’s stuff we can learn + borrow + attempt to replicate + build towards, in the extremely complex and urgent realm of climate change, that builds on some of the lessons learned from COVID responses. I didn’t come here to plug my own work or anything, but it was striking to me in documenting state and non-state responses just how creative and agile these formations could get. (I’ll point you to the original study + database if you’d like). The point I’m trying to make is, I think, that public responses to large-scale challenges can be bottom-up in nature and achieve some degree of cohesion and coordination, even in a system of systems as dazzlingly complex and diversified as, say, Indian cities.

Anyway, the points I’m trying to make, I think, is that

1. imaginations of the city are being forced to change, thanks to the routine flooding, resource shortages, air-pollution excesses, etc. that some of our largest cities are facing.
2. the fast-developing “tier-2” cities represent an opportunity not just for real estate and economic growth, which we read about all the time, but precisely to reshape this imagination of the megalopolis city
3. the deeply fragmented nature of governance institutions is for sure an issue. I’m personally encouraged by efforts like the Climate Action Cell.
4. the question of who owns the city is a necessarily political question, and the only long-lasting, viable answer I can imagine to that is some sort of broad-based people’s coalition that includes various kinds of stakeholders. I refer, for example, to The Last Farm’s ecosocialism-rooted proposal for “The Climate Corps” (though in an American context).

Of course, at a deeper level - and some of the issues your reflections bring up do signal that - what lurks here is our collective agreements re. growth at all costs and at the expense of other ways of life. Bangalore’s growth engulfing periurban areas and PACMAN-like consumption of groundwater from villages all around it, while the tank system lies forgotten is just one example. I’m sure other cities have their own distinct dynamics that do repeat/rhyme some of these underlying tendencies.

Add to that the massive youth unemployment numbers we’re looking at that’s fuelling cities’ economic engines and pressures on resources. Rural-urban employment dynamics are slowly shifting, for sure. But in general, migrants are coming to cities for work for a number of reasons, some of which could be that crops have failed, or that water has run out, or some equally crucial reason. So population explosion in cities is not a problem to be seen in isolation.

All in all, a system-map sounds like a really valuable exercise to figure out entry points to this conversation.

[Gauri]

Hi Sameer, my first time here - love your LinkedIn posts. Very few of us are able to be honest about the fact that we need sustainability to save ourselves, not the planet. And that this involves actual changes for each individual. Any government, NGO or group of activists can’t solve this for us.

I personally take a lot of issue with mainstream businesses being highly irresponsible about their ecological footprint and focusing only on sales/growth. Whether it is consumer products or quick delivery, as long as it remains ok for a corporation to do absolutely anything, just because they haven’t signed up for a sustainability goal, I fear nothing will change. This includes abuse and pollution of resources and generating excessive waste.

I hope you don’t feel I am making a nebulous point. People WANT to change. In about 4 years of running Arani Ecosteps, we have interacted with lakhs of people actively looking for sustainable solutions. They don’t want to throw plastic bottles every month. They don’t want deliveries in plastic bags, they don’t want food containers to be littered all over the city. But real, affordable and logical solutions at scale are not offered by corporations. They scale extremely wasteful solutions rather rapidly, but I am so surprised that simple options like bamboo toothbrushes or shampoo bars have to be hunted in random corners of the internet even though they are SO easy to take to market.

I of course; speak from the urban waste perspective because that’s what I’ve been working on. Nearly 40% of the plastic waste found in landfills comes from consumer products packaging. Recycling remains in early teens % at best and is mostly downcycling. When brands can’t reduce plastic in their packaging, they buy neutrality credits and keep creating waste same as before. The sheer scale of this is mind boggling because we are (more and more) just lauding and funding waste-generating businesses without wondering if they even tried to build sustainability into their (commercial) operations.

It can’t be the job of a few do-gooders - individuals or corporates. And it shouldn’t be just a feel good conversation to have at events. Real solutions need to be developed, scaled and appreciated as mainstream, not as some cute initiatives.

I truly feel the consumer is awake and is genuinely looking for a change. People are willing to reduce their consumption, compost at home, go to refill stations, segregate their waste, all of it. But avenues for these are SO limited, when you can find wasteful products and services at your fingertips.

Capital allocation can change this very fundamentally. Funds can build different metrics for sustainable businesses and channel more money towards them for (maybe) smaller profits. We really can’t do business on a dead plant after all…and to be less dramatic, impact funds have been doing this for decades. It just hasn’t scaled enough. And I feel it is relatively easy to scale, especially when you have people ready to put the fight on the ground, and consumers actively looking to adopt the solutions they build.

[Smita]

I think recognising the complexity of Indian cities is crucial.
While we have urban planning solutions in theory, the reality is that large parts of cities are already there, and these solutions can’t be retrofitted entirely nor can cities be redeveloped to incorporate them. Even in tier 2/3 cities, the economic development model might be hard to change in the near term, though there is definitely opportunity to influence and provide support. Working with the existing has inherent limitations - which needs a focus on design and also implementation related innovation.
The other issue is the non existent urban planning in our cities. Service delivery is only one aspect of what urban planning should entail. That leads to the complexity of working on the key levers - who is responsible, and how to influence actions at scale? Here is a detailed report on urban planning capacity related reforms that describes the scale of the issue - - https://www.niti.gov.in/sites/default/files/2021-09/UrbanPlanningCapacity-in-India-16092021.pdf

Creating a system map of climate action in cities in this context is essentially also a vision setting exercise towards the larger goals of resilience (including disaster planning and health needs) and climate responsible cities/ resource efficiency. Complexity demands strategic thought to define system boundaries and timescales. There will be overlaps, co-benefits as well as tradeoffs, and it might also identify gaps and help prioritise areas of work. I am aware it can seem theoretical but it needs to be attempted, to make sense of how actions add up towards impact - especially from a funder’s perspective. I’d be glad to support a focussed discussion on creating such a systems map for prioritising urban action.

[sameershisodia]

Had an informal one-off in person conversation and whiteboarding session around this, out of the blue. Here’s an attempted summary of the city problem.

Of course, the larger “cities” problem needs the addendum of the goal setting (why don’t we have 10k attractive-to-20-yr-olds cities, making use of the various typologies above) at the nation scale, not individual city focused.