Special Issue on Urbanization and Climate Change is out now!

While, A. and Whitehead, M. (2013) ‘Urbanization and Climate Change Special Issue’ Urban Studies 59(7).

There was a recent magazine advert that was developed by the energy company Total that I found strangely compelling. Under the banner headline ‘Common Interests’ (the Co was in a different colour font), was the image of an imposing iceberg floating serenely on the ocean. What was arresting about the advert was what lay beneath the ice. Where there should have been the ice there was instead an inverted city, replete with brightly lit skyscrapers and sprawling suburbs. In many ways this image serves as an appropriate visual metaphor for our special issue on Urbanization and Climate Change. Just as this image makes a clever connection between the changing climate and what is going on in our increasingly urbanized planet, this special issue brings critical perspective to the complex relations between urbanization and climate change.

It addition to its overall visual impact, what I found most intriguing about this image was the area of interfaced connection that it constructed between the city and the ice. In many urban contexts, the climatic impacts of cities are felt in places that are distant from the metropolises themselves. But this image brought the environmentally distant into the immediate proximity of the city, and it made me think deeply about the varied connections that exist between urbanization and the changing climate. At one level, these connections are fairly obvious: urban areas are, after all, responsible for two thirds of all of the greenhouse gas emission that enter the atmosphere every year. In addition to being the villains of the climate change process, however, many cities are also the victims of the effects of a changing climate. Flooding, extreme weather, tidal inundation, and water shortages are now threats that face many cities around the world. In this context, cities are now key contexts within which climate change adaptation practises are being developed and implemented. Cities also have their own particular climatic challenges. The urban heat island effect, makes cities much more vulnerable to the impacts of increasing temperature than other geographical locations. At the other end of the spectrum, the palls of aerosol pollution that surround many cities appear to insulating urban centres from the full heat of the increasing in global average temperatures we are witnessing.       

This special issue explores all of these themes in a range of different geographical contexts. In exploring these themes, the papers in this special issue develop a critical account of the urban climate agenda. This critical perspective seeks to better understand the political and economic nature of the urbanization process, and the ways in which this process conditions urban climate change impacts and policies. This critical perspective is also about utilizing the urban as a context within which to understand the uneven spatial develop and distribution of climate change policies and regimes of responsibility throughout the world.

If it wasn’t for the fact that the advert I was so drawn to was created by Total, I might suggest that it was an icon for this special issue. Having said that, it is clear that the advertising of big oil companies has become a lot more sensitive to climate change in recent years. Against the backdrop of a imposing glacier, one Humble advertisement once proudly boasted that each day it “supplied enough energy to melt 7 tons of glacier!”

Degrowth Special Issue Out Now

 

This new special issue on Degrowth contains some interesting reflections on the movement and it philosophical underpinnings.

Welsh Perceptions of Climate Change Survey

My colleagues at Cardiff University (Stuart Capstick and Nick Pidgeon) and I have just published the first survey of Welsh attitudes towards climate change. This project, which is largely the fruits of Stuart’s labour, is part of ongoing research within the Climate Change Consortium of Wales C3W. The survey found that a large majority of the Welsh public are of the view that the Earth’s climate is changing, and most accept at least some role for human activity in its causation. It also explores the impacts of the recent floods in Wales on perception of climate change, and public attitudes towards key adaptation strategies.

The full report can be read here C3W%20report%20FINAL

 

Degrowth or Regrowth (Editorial)

If you ask people what they remember most about the financial crisis of 2008 you are likely to hear phrases such as the subprime bubble, toxic assets, Bear Stearns, or Northern Rock. As an environmentalist, the main focus of my recollections is slightly different. What I remember most vividly was the desperation with which central bankers and politicians sought to immediately chart a path that would lead us out of economic recession and back to economic growth. It appeared that regardless of the financial, social and environmental costs associated with unfettered economic growth that the primary political priority was to return us to the collective safety and prosperity that only growth could secure. The subsequent lowering of interest rates, quantitative easing, and reductions in value added tax rates, were all devoted to increasing consumption, stimulating production, and re-growing the economy.

The unthinking pursuit of a “V-Shaped” recovery from recession back to growth is a feature of the prevailing neo-liberal assumption that the expansion of the economy is the sine quo non of a happy and affluent society (Jackson, 2003; Peck, 2010). The financial crisis was, however, utilized by some to critically think about our collective devotion to growth. In July 2008, just as the economic crisis was beginning to unfold, the New Economics Foundation proposed a clear-sighted and inspiring vision of a Green New Deal(2008). As an ecological equivalent of Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Green New Deal suggested that the economic crisis represented an opportunity to build a new type of economy, within which the creation of economic prosperity was not senselessly decoupled from environmental issues. But 2008 also witnessed the re-emergence of a broader socio-ecological movement that was mobilized around a critique of the growth ethic itself. In April 2008 academics and activists gathered in Paris forEconomic De-Growth For Ecological Sustainability And Social Equity Conference. The declaration that followed this conference called‘for a paradigm shift from the general and unlimited pursuit of economic growth to a concept of “right-sizing” the global and national economies’ (Declaration of the Parties, 2008). This conference helped to establish and popularize the notion of degrowth, and laid the foundation for an intellectual, political and cultural movement that has become a prominent feature of radical environmental politics.

Load Profiles and Household Energy Use

(Source: National Grid, UK)

Earlier this week I attended a fascinating workshop on household energy practises at Durham University (hosted and organised by Harriet Bulkeley and her research team). The workshop was for an Social Science Advisory Group, which has been established to advise on Northern Powergrid and British Gas’s Customer Led Network Revolution. This scheme centres around the largest smart-grid project in the UK (involving 14,000 homes and costing £54 million to implement). While our discussions were broad ranging and considered the potential impacts on smart meeting and In-House Energy Displays on household energy usage, one of the most interesting things about the workshop for me was the perspective it provided on the processes that are driving the restructuring of the domestic and commercial energy market in the UK. 

While the move towards smart-grids and meters is, of course, being driven by a desire to reduce, in aggregate, household energy use and thus help the UK along the road to a lower carbon economy, it is also being conditioned by issues of daily household demand.

The diagram above is a load profile of energy use across the UK over the past 7 days (these profiles are available from the National Grid). What this load profile reveals are the daily fluctuations that exist in British energy use (with the expected peaks in the morning and evening periods). It is interesting to note that with the onset of the low carbon, electric economy, these peak energy use periods are likely to see more energy demand being placed upon them (as people plug in their electric cars after returning home from a long day of work). Given the great pressures that such load profiles place on energy supply networks during peak periods, energy suppliers are not only interested in how to make the home more energy efficient, but also how to redistribute energy use throughout the day.

The redistribution of energy use has, of course, been a long-time concern of energy suppliers. As a previous user of storage heaters I was able to make the most of the low, off-peak energy tariffs associated with the Economy Seven initiative. But current discussions about the timing of domestic energy practise have interesting implications for behaviour change policies. It appears that shifting people’s TV watching practises from the peak evening slot of 7-9pm will be difficult, as will moving the timing of when people cook their evening meals. There may be more flexibility, however, as to precisely when people choose to take a bath/shower or put their washing machines on. New tariffs are being used to incentivise off-peak energy use, but as all UK homes join smart grids over the next decade, it will be interesting to see just how flexible our domestic energy use routines actually are. 

Western Mail op ed on Rio+20

What is The Future We Want? Rio + & -

Carl Death and Mark Whitehead, Aberystwyth University

In the past few weeks of excitement over the Euro 2012 football tournament, a succession of rugby internationals, Wimbledon, the build-up to the Olympics, and the Royal Jubilee – as well as front pages dominated by Greek elections, violence in Syria, the G20 summit in Mexico, and elections in Egypt (not to mention the flooding in mid-Wales) – the fact that global leaders were meeting in Brazil to negotiate a global agreement on sustainable development has largely passed without comment. On Friday 22 June the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, held in Rio de Janeiro, concluded by adopting a negotiated text entitled The Future We Want. Coming twenty years after the trail-blazing Rio Earth Summit, Rio+20 (as it has become known) is therefore an appropriate moment to assess the progress that has been made towards achieving environmental, social and economic sustainability.

Reflections on the Sustainable City – Planetary Structured Coherences

Roger Keil and I’s  new chapter on sustainable urbanism has just been published in the Oxford Handbook of Urban Politics. In this chapter we develop the idea that the structured coherence of cities increasingly operates at a planetary scale. We feel that this idea has implications for how we interpret the connections between urbanisation and the Anthropocene.