The interconnection with climate crisis and inequality in the future of urbanization

Abstract

I would like to look at the connection between the three agendas of this conference (sustainable development, climate change and disaster risk agendas) that many people, present here at this meeting and otherwise, have helped construct over the last decade. Before I do that, one way of looking forward through the question of urbanizing futures of sustainability, is to look back. If we want to get some sense of where we might be in the 2050s and the 2070s, it might be useful to look back (maybe 30 or 50 years) and see what distance we have come over that period of time. The obvious thing may be to go back to Brundtland and the framing of sustainable development in the formal process (United Nations, 1987). In that, of course, urbanization is tagged on at the end. It is not a central part of that agenda. Brundtland’s definition is very focused on intergenerational equity concerns. There are very serious issues of intergenerational questions, apart from other environmental considerations. Or, one could go back to Barbara Ward. It is 50 years since 1972 and Stockholm. She was pivotal in trying to frame this agenda, both in the sustainability space but also bringing together the urban and the sustainability argument, especially around the Habitat 1 forum in 1976 and her writing. I will take you to a slightly different space. I will take you back to 1972 and a book that made waves at that point of time, written by colleagues, friends and mentors of mine; a book called The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972). When I came to look at it analytically – maybe 30 years ago when we were in the run-up to the Rio conference and we recalibrated the models they put together in the early 70s – there was actually a shock that we experienced. What I found was that in the early 90s, we were unfortunately very much on track to where the broad global dynamics would work, as far as that model is concerned. It was an analytical model. It was a global model. It had lots of critiques that came from all shapes and sizes, including from the Harvard economists. The unfortunate fact today is (and it’s not a prediction) is that in the 2020s we are (in some dramatic and unfortunate ways) in the midst of a series of very deep challenges; on the development front of course, on the economic and political front, and also on the environmental front. In a sense what Limits was saying at that time in trying to get a handle on questions of sustainability of the global system and global society, is that there may well be an overshoot and these now manifest consequent challenges. It seems that we are close to at least one of those cusps at this current point of time. Two and a half years ago we would have had no sense that we would have the kind of global challenges seen with COVID. COVID (as I’ve written about elsewhere) is the perfect SDG (Sustainable Development Goal) crisis. It started around health (in SDG 3), but permeated through the entire system touching poverty, inequality and pretty much every one of the goals. In effect, if you look at the world today we may have retreated from the kind of progress seen in the last five or six years, but in some parts of the world, such as India, maybe a decade or more.