Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

6 Cities and Climate Change: The Precedents and Why They Matter by Michael Hebbert and Vladimir Jankovic This article was originally published in Urban Studies, 50(7), 2013. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098013480970 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons A ttribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) license ABSTRACT This paper reviews the long tradition of city-scale climatological and meteorological applications prior to the emergence in the 1990s of early work on the urban/global climate change interface. It shows how ‘valuing and seeing the urban’ came to be achieved within modern scientific meteorology and how in a limited but significant set of cases that science has contributed to urban practice. The paper traces the evolution of urban climatology since 1950 as a distinct research field within physical geography and meteorology, and its transition from observational monographs to process modelling; reviews the precedents, successful or otherwise, of knowledge transfer from science into public action through climatically aware regulation or design of urban environment; and notes the neglect of these precedents in contemporary climate change discourse—a serious omission. INTRODUCTION It is an indisputable fact that cities were initially overlooked in the IPCC process. The science consisted of climatic forecasts framed at a global scale and the policy stakeholders were international or state actors. Scientists involved in global climate forecasting were slow to engage with the urban phenomenon except as an anomaly, city weather stations being a source of data distortion within the synoptic grid. The initial techniques for calculating national greenhouse gas inventories were based on the sectors of energy, industry, land use, agriculture and waste, making it hard to detect the role of urbanisation. Cities were not mentioned in the Kyoto Protocol. A similar sectoral logic applied to the periodic Global Environmental Outlook published by the United Nations Environment Programme. Governmental actors reinforced this predisposition: it was natural for the process of international negotiation to frame the climate change issue in terms of ministerial portfolios. The conventions of intergovernmental diplomacy discouraged consideration of urbanisation as a forcing factor and cities as distinct territorial stakeholders within the IPCC process. Today, these exclusions are breaking down, bringing a sense of fresh opportunity at the urban level. The increasingly fine resolution of models of the earth’s atmosphere (down to 25 km globally) means that cities are for the first time visible within general circulation systems. The environment of the city with its three-dimensional geometry, heat-absorbing materials, impermeable surfaces and pollution concentrations, is beginning to be resolved in weather models. Governmental actors have realised that mayors may be able to maintain progress where international agreement had stalled. Urbanisation entered for the first time as a climate change consideration in the fourth assessment report of 2007 and the fifth report due in 2014 will contain a separate chapter on cities and attempt a full- scale assessment of their role in carbon pollution and their potential adaptability to climate risk. The contemporary literature on cities and climate change—not least this Special Issue of Urban Studies—shows cities at last incorporated into global climate policy both as causal agents in greenhouse gas emissions/mitigation and as vulnerable targets. In thinking about cities and climate change, it is hard to avoid the word ‘unprecedented’. Everything hinges on recent scientific discovery and response to projected future threat. The time-frame stretches back no further than 1988, the year of UN General Assembly Resolution 43/53 and the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; or 1994 and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; or 1997, year of the Kyoto Protocol. All the C3 actors are new-born—ICLEI in 1990, the Climate Alliance in 1991, UNCED’s Rio Conference in 1992, ICLEI’s Climate Change Programme in 1993, energie-cités in 1994, the UN’s Cities and Climate Change in 2008, the World Bank’s Mayors’ Task Force on Urban Poverty and Climate Change in 2009. It is often remarked that the discovery of global climate change has coincided with the tipping point to a world in which city-dwellers outnumber rural folk. So UN-Habitat summarises the threat to humanity Fuelled by two powerful human-induced forces that have been unleashed by development and manipulation of the environment in the industrial age, the effects of urbanization and climate change are converging in dangerous ways which threaten to have unprecedented negative impacts upon quality of life and economic and social stability (UN-HABITAT, 2011, p. 1). This paper challenges none of the above except to put a question mark by the word unprecedented. It was at the scale of the urban heat island that anthropogenic effects—many linked to carbon combustion—were first systematically studied. The seminal contribution came from Albert Kratzer whose Das Stadtklima (1937) originated as a PhD thesis under the supervision of the geographer Edward Fels. Fels’s own work on environmental impacts of economic progress—the businessman as shaper of the earth, Der wirtshaftende