Cities on a Finite Planet

Cities on a Finite Planet PDF Author: Sheridan Bartlett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317291964
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Cities on a Finite Planet: Transformative responses to climate change shows how cities can combine high quality living conditions, resilience to climate change, disaster risk reduction and contributions to mitigation/low carbon development. It also covers the current and potential contribution of cities to avoiding dangerous climate change and is the first book with an in-depth coverage of how cities and their governments, citizens and civil society organizations can combine these different agendas, based on careful city-level analyses. The foundation for the book is detailed city case studies on Bangalore, Bangkok, Dar es Salaam, Durban, London, Manizales, Mexico City, New York and Rosario. Each of these was led by authors who contributed to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment and are thus acknowledged as among the world’s top specialists in this field. This book highlights where there is innovation and progress in cities and how this was achieved. Also where there is little progress and no action and where there is no capacity to act. It also assesses the extent to which cities can address the Sustainable Development Goals within commitments to also dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In this, it highlights how much progress on these different agendas depends on local governments and their capacities to work with their low-income populations.

Cities on a Finite Planet

Cities on a Finite Planet PDF Author: Sheridan Bartlett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317291964
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cities on a Finite Planet: Transformative responses to climate change shows how cities can combine high quality living conditions, resilience to climate change, disaster risk reduction and contributions to mitigation/low carbon development. It also covers the current and potential contribution of cities to avoiding dangerous climate change and is the first book with an in-depth coverage of how cities and their governments, citizens and civil society organizations can combine these different agendas, based on careful city-level analyses. The foundation for the book is detailed city case studies on Bangalore, Bangkok, Dar es Salaam, Durban, London, Manizales, Mexico City, New York and Rosario. Each of these was led by authors who contributed to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment and are thus acknowledged as among the world’s top specialists in this field. This book highlights where there is innovation and progress in cities and how this was achieved. Also where there is little progress and no action and where there is no capacity to act. It also assesses the extent to which cities can address the Sustainable Development Goals within commitments to also dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In this, it highlights how much progress on these different agendas depends on local governments and their capacities to work with their low-income populations.

Cities on a Finite Planet

Cities on a Finite Planet PDF Author: Sheridan Bartlett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317291972
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Cities on a Finite Planet: Transformative responses to climate change shows how cities can combine high quality living conditions, resilience to climate change, disaster risk reduction and contributions to mitigation/low carbon development. It also covers the current and potential contribution of cities to avoiding dangerous climate change and is the first book with an in-depth coverage of how cities and their governments, citizens and civil society organizations can combine these different agendas, based on careful city-level analyses. The foundation for the book is detailed city case studies on Bangalore, Bangkok, Dar es Salaam, Durban, London, Manizales, Mexico City, New York and Rosario. Each of these was led by authors who contributed to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment and are thus acknowledged as among the world’s top specialists in this field. This book highlights where there is innovation and progress in cities and how this was achieved. Also where there is little progress and no action and where there is no capacity to act. It also assesses the extent to which cities can address the Sustainable Development Goals within commitments to also dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In this, it highlights how much progress on these different agendas depends on local governments and their capacities to work with their low-income populations.

Quintessential Cities, Accountable to the Future

Quintessential Cities, Accountable to the Future PDF Author: Voula Mega
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461473489
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
​ ​This book can be seen as the third part of an unofficial trilogy on Sustainable Cities of the Future with the author's previous books 'Sustainable Development, Energy and the City' and 'Sustainable Cities for the third millennium: The Odyssey of urban excellence', both prefaced by Prof. Sir Peter Hall. All three books follow the evolving forefront of innovations towards Sustainable Cities. They collectively try to respond to the questions: What future cities wish to build (with their scarcities and capacities) on a finite planet? What do-they do to achieve this? How do-they contribute to redesign the world? The third book adopts, first and foremost, a strategic foresight approach including a scan of the future trends, tensions and risks in a more uncertain world, the possible and preferable futures, emerging policy issues, such as intergenerational cities or cities welcoming the immigrants and their impact on sustainable development, the Rio+20 prospects and the effects of the protracted crisis, efforts by world interconnected cities, including a case-study on Bangkok, a laboratory of urban change, and examples of frugal and resilient urban policies.​

Pathways to Urban Sustainability

Pathways to Urban Sustainability PDF Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309444535
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Cities have experienced an unprecedented rate of growth in the last decade. More than half the world's population lives in urban areas, with the U.S. percentage at 80 percent. Cities have captured more than 80 percent of the globe's economic activity and offered social mobility and economic prosperity to millions by clustering creative, innovative, and educated individuals and organizations. Clustering populations, however, can compound both positive and negative conditions, with many modern urban areas experiencing growing inequality, debility, and environmental degradation. The spread and continued growth of urban areas presents a number of concerns for a sustainable future, particularly if cities cannot adequately address the rise of poverty, hunger, resource consumption, and biodiversity loss in their borders. Intended as a comparative illustration of the types of urban sustainability pathways and subsequent lessons learned existing in urban areas, this study examines specific examples that cut across geographies and scales and that feature a range of urban sustainability challenges and opportunities for collaborative learning across metropolitan regions. It focuses on nine cities across the United States and Canada (Los Angeles, CA, New York City, NY, Philadelphia, PA, Pittsburgh, PA, Grand Rapids, MI, Flint, MI, Cedar Rapids, IA, Chattanooga, TN, and Vancouver, Canada), chosen to represent a variety of metropolitan regions, with consideration given to city size, proximity to coastal and other waterways, susceptibility to hazards, primary industry, and several other factors.

Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet

Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet PDF Author: Thomas Murphy, Jr.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578866963
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Textbook for general-education college course on the physics of energy and its role in the broader context of society. Topics include exponential growth, economic growth, population, the role of space exploration, energy units, thermal energy, fossil fuels, climate change, hydroelectricity, wind power, solar power, biological energy, nuclear energy, comparison of alternative energy options, the role of human psychology, prospects for a plan, and adaptation strategies. Appendices include refreshers on math and chemistry, selected answers from end-of-chapter problems, and worthwhile tangents. Contains 195 graphics, 70 tables, a glossary, bibliography, and index.

Consumed

Consumed PDF Author: Sarah Elton
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022609376X
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
By 2050, the world population is expected to reach nine billion. And the challenge of feeding this rapidly growing population is being made greater by climate change, which will increasingly wreak havoc on the way we produce our food. At the same time, we have lost touch with the soil—few of us know where our food comes from, let alone how to grow it—and we are at the mercy of multinational corporations who control the crops and give little thought to the damage their methods are inflicting on the planet. Our very future is at risk. In Consumed, Sarah Elton walks fields and farms on three continents, not only investigating the very real threats to our food, but also telling the little-known stories of the people who are working against time to create a new and hopeful future. From the mountains of southern France to the highlands of China, from the crowded streets of Nairobi to the banks of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, we meet people from all walks of life who are putting together an alternative to the omnipresent industrial food system. In the arid fields of rural India we meet a farmer who has transformed her community by selling organic food directly to her neighbors. We visit a laboratory in Toronto where scientists are breeding a new kind of rice seed that they claim will feed the world. We learn about Italy’s underground food movement; how university grads are returning to the fields in China, Greece, and France; and how in Detroit, plots of vacant land planted with kale and carrots can help us see what’s possible. Food might be the problem, but as Elton shows, it is also the solution. The food system as we know it was assembled in a few decades—and if it can be built that quickly, it can be reassembled and improved in the same amount of time. Elton here lays out the targets we need to meet by the year 2050. The stories she tells give us hope for avoiding a daunting fate and instead help us to believe in a not-too-distant future when we can all sit at the table.

Sustainable Tourism on a Finite Planet

Sustainable Tourism on a Finite Planet PDF Author: Megan Epler Wood
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1315439794
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Sustainable Tourism in the 21st Century provides students, professionals and policy makers with a global overview of the growth of the tourism industry, its impacts, supply chains, environmental management techniques, and research requirements. It provides input on how policy makers should approach the tourism industry in future in the fields of environment, business, governmental policy, and sustainable development.

Creating Regenerative Cities

Creating Regenerative Cities PDF Author: Herbert Girardet
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317654102
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Large, modern cities have effectively declared their independence from nature. But while they take up only three percent of the world’s land surface, their ecological footprints actually cover the entire globe. Humanity is building an urban future, yet urban resource use is threatening the future of humanity and the natural world. To meet the aspirations of city people in both developing and developed countries, bold new initiatives are needed. Modern cities are an astonishing human achievement. As centres of innovation they are humanity’s cultural playgrounds. Their communication and transport systems have developed a global reach. They are attractive to investors because they can offer a vast variety of services at comparatively low per-capita costs. But are they viable as ecological systems? The planning of new cities, as well as the retrofit of existing cities, needs to undergo a profound paradigm shift. Mere 'sustainable development' is not enough. To be compatible with natural systems, cities need to move away from linear systems of resource use and learn to operate as closed-loop, circular systems. To ensure their long-term future, they need to develop an environmentally enhancing, restorative relationship between themselves and the natural systems on which they still depend. Creating Regenerative Cities is a concise, solution-oriented manual for creating regenerative urbanisation. A wide range of technical, management and policy solutions already exist, but implementation has been too slow and too little, in large part because the kinds of holistic approaches needed are still unfamiliar to fragmented and process-driven urban policy making and governance. Herbert Girardet's 30 years’ experience as an ecologist, thinker, film maker and consultant working around the world has created this unique combination of tried and tested best practices and policies, which outlines the fundamental shifts needed in the way we think about our cities.

Sustainability in America's Cities

Sustainability in America's Cities PDF Author: Matt Slavin
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1610910281
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
"Sustainability" is more than the latest "green" buzzword. It represents a new way of viewing the interactions of human society and the natural world. Sustainability in America's Cities highlights how America's largest cities are acting to develop sustainable solutions to conflicts between development and environment. As sustainability rises to the top of public policy agendas in American cities, it is also emerging as a new discipline in colleges and universities. Specifically designed for these educational programs, this is the first book to provide empirically based, multi-disciplinary case studies of sustainability policy, planning, and practice in action. It is also valuable for everyone who designs and implements sustainability initiatives, including policy makers, public sector and non-profit practitioners, and consultants. Sustainability in America's Cities brings together academic and practicing professionals to offer firsthand insight into innovative strategies that cities have adopted in renewable energy and energy efficiency, climate change, green building, clean-tech and green jobs, transportation and infrastructure, urban forestry and sustainable food production. Case studies examine sustainability initiatives in a wide range of American cities, including San Francisco, Honolulu, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Milwaukee, New York City, Portland, Oregon and Washington D.C. The concluding chapter ties together the empirical evidence and recounts lessons learned for sustainability planning and policy.

America’s Most Sustainable Cities and Regions

America’s Most Sustainable Cities and Regions PDF Author: John W. Day
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1493932438
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
This book takes you on a unique journey through American history, taking time to consider the forces that shaped the development of various cities and regions, and arrives at an unexpected conclusion regarding sustainability. From the American Dream to globalization to the digital and information revolutions, we assume that humans have taken control of our collective destinies in spite of potholes in the road such as the Great Recession of 2007-2009. However, these attitudes were formed during a unique 100-year period of human history in which a large but finite supply of fossil fuels was tapped to feed our economic and innovation engine. Today, at the peak of the Oil Age, the horizon looks different. Cities such as Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas are situated where water and other vital ecological services are scarce, and the enormous flows of resources and energy that were needed to create the megalopolises of the 20th century will prove unsustainable. Climate change is a reality, and regional impacts will become increasingly severe. Economies such as Las Vegas, which are dependent on discretionary income and buffeted by climate change, are already suffering the fate of the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Finite resources will mean profound changes for society in general and the energy-intensive lifestyles of the US and Canada in particular. But not all regions are equally vulnerable to these 21st-century megatrends. Are you ready to look beyond “America’s Most Livable Cities” to the critical factors that will determine the sustainability of your municipality and region? Find out where your city or region ranks according to the forces that will impact our lives in the next years and decades. Find out how: ·resource availability and ecological services shaped the modern landscape ·emerging megatrends will make cities and regions more or less livable in the new century ·your city or region ranks on a “sustainability” map of the United States ·urban metabolism puts large cities at particular risk ·sustainability factors will favor economic solutions at a local, rather than global, level ·these principles apply to industrial economies and countries globally. This book should be cited as follows: J. Day, C. Hall, E. Roy, M. Moersbaecher, C. D'Elia, D. Pimentel, and A. Yanez. 2016. America's most sustainable cities and regions: Surviving the 21st century megatrends. Springer, New York. 348 p.