Urban Renassaince and the rural hinterland; a trade of ecosystem services

Urban renaissance and the rural hinterland: A discussion paper for the Shanghai Symposium on Urban Systems.

Andrew Bell

UK Committee for the UNESCO Man and Biosphere Programme c/o Bideford Station

East the Water Bideford Devon

UK Email: [email protected]

Abstract: Given the urban/rural proportions of the population it follows that urban areas will be a major focus of exchanges and developments that will lead to a more sustainable society in general. However, the ecological footprint of cities suggests that this discourse on sustainability and the ensuing actions will not be confined to the within the boundaries of cities alone. The reliance of cities on the ecosystem services provided by their rural and/or maritime peripheries and hinterland suggest that integrated land use planning must extend beyond the city limits as well as cities making major changes in way that they use the resources provided to them. The challenge of retrofitting the older cities to be more sustainable in their day-to-day operation may provide an opportunity to support better rural development that will reduce rate of depopulation of rural areas. Under the principles of the Ecosystem Approach under the Convention for Biological Diversity, particularly of sharing benefits, modalities can be explored that elicit a true exchange of goods and services, such as materials and energy. The paper explores the current discourse in the rural and urban systems and seeks to offer some suggestions for a win-win scenario. Acknowledgements: Jane Houghton (Natural England), Steve Hillier (UK DFiD), Andy Tully (DEFRA), Peter Head (ARUP) Introduction The projections for population change for the global when analysed for urban and rural indicate that as global population increases, the urban areas increase and the rural areas will actually decrease (see Figure1). At first glance, depopulation of the rural areas might mean reduced disturbance to some of the largest ecosystems and habitats, and could be a demonstration of sustainable retreat as advocated by Lovelock. The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development suggests that the lack of rural/urban connections in developing countries with expanding urban populations will lead to deeper rural poverty in these areas, which in turn can lead to more rural poor migrating to cities to add to the urban poor, or providing a workforce for the economy of the urban areas. Currently one billion of the world’s 6.7 billion people live in urban poverty (DfiD, 2010)

Figure 1; Predicted growth of urban and rural populations. Source: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs/Population Division 5. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision. The rates of urban growth vary around the regions as shown in figure 2. The indications are that the urbanisation will be fuelling the development of these regions, but it poses an interesting question about the trajectory that will be taken in terms of their sustainable development.

Figure 2: Urban Population predictions; Source: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs/Population Division 5. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision.

Figure 3; Predicted urban population growth by sub-regions to 2050; Source: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs/Population Division 5. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision. From these data we note that the greatest urban expansions are going to be in the least developed and less developed regions. This gives rise to concerns about the levels and extent of poverty within the urban and peri-urban areas as the large cities develop. Assuming the same proportions of poverty will follow the DfID Cities report then up to 2 Billion people could still be urban poor. Using a combined indicator of Ecological footprint and sustainable development. Plotting Ecological footprint per head with the Human Development index for the state presents a useful image of where environmental, economic and social sustainability might be achieved. (Figure 3)

Figure 3: Plot of EF against HDI in 2003

Some authors have suggested a correlation that might imply that as states develop it is inevitable that they will never become sustainable. However, observing the same data over a time series rather than a snapshot suggests that some states can make trajectories towards the sector of the graph that suggests sustainable development. From the observations we note that having high urban components in the state does not necessarily hinder progress towards sustainable development.

Figure 4 Trajectories of development of states form 1975 to 2004 of Ecological Footprint and HDI. Size of disc is indicative of the proportion of urban population. (source: http://graphs.gapminder.org/ ) Going into finer scale and using Ecological Footprint as a metric for the resource use by cities indicates that cities demand more resources than they currently provide internally.

City Overshoot Factor

Source

Bath (UK) 20 Doughty and Hammond, 1997, 2004

London (UK) 125 (Girardet, 1999

Santiago de Chile (Chile)

16 Wackernagel, 1998,

Vancouver 200 Rees and Wackernagel, 1996

Table 1: Ecological Footprint Overshoot of a selection of cities. The reasons for this urban overshoot of the ecological footprint compared to the footprint of the city by orders of magnitude is primarily to energy requirements, the waste disposal needs, and the raw resources needed by the city dwellers and city economy. For example, as drivers of industrial economies and the processing of raw

materials for use within the city and possibly in the rural areas and export can explain a large part of the overshoot. The difference between the urban and rural ecological footprint per head of population is not quite so marked. The urban ecological footprint of European states is often less due to the reduced transport required in rural areas. Classification of service

Rural/Marine to Urban

Urban to Rural Urban to urban

Provisioning Food production Food production

Materials/raw commodities

Energy Production materials

Fossil energy generation Energy

Water provision Water recycling Regulating Waste handling Waste recycling

Carbon sequestering Urban cooling Flood attenuation Supporting Water purification Water recycling

Cultural and socio-economic

Access to open space (green and blue infrastructure)

Access to markets

Dormitory settlements Centralised services Efficient Processing Education Health Table 2: Exchange of services between urban and rural areas. (font size is an indication of relative scale of service) Technology and improved planning has delivered much greater self-reliance of cities with regard to their metabolism. However, the fact that there are the large exchanges between urban areas and their marine and rural hinterlands implies that cities are far from being islands that independent of the resources and services provided by surrounding areas. (see table 2) The current mode for developing new eco-cities is giving rise to new technologies and techniques. The visionary work by ARUP on various sites, Bill McDonough at Guantang Chuangye, and Bjarke Ingels on Zira Island show how the design of new cities and communities can have less negative impact on their surroundings. These new and visionary approaches are often applied opportunistically where there is a need for a new city or larger expansion. Other examples include the Thames Gateway where an approach to urban expansion seeks to interweave green infrastructure that will support and sustain the community along the estuary of the Thames. This particular area is rich in biodiversity and therefore needs very sensitive planning to accommodate that asset. The case of retrofitting However, referring back to the population predictions in Figure 1, even if all the new urban growth between 2010 and 2050 was accomplished using the best practices to

date, this would still leave 3.5 Billion people still with lifestyles that are “business as usual”. This assumes that developments within cities have a lifespan of 30 to 40 years (or more considering the Victorian accommodation in many of the UK cities). Research for the UK Committee Climate Change (CCC, 2009) suggests that only 10% of currently available technology for energy efficiency in housing is taken up each year. In which case the contribution of new build and new development will be even less and the case for broad-scale retrofitting made even stronger. The epitome of large retrofitting within cities again tends to be opportunistic; such as Olympic developments, or the Soccer World Cup where the investment is readily available and there is a vision for the city have a strong socio-environmental legacy. The London 2012 example has been a major re-design and retrofit of large areas within London that has resulted in the restoration of 45 Ha of good quality habitat within the development area, doubling that which was previously present (Olympic Delivery Authority, 2008). Accompanying the new biodiversity is a range of good sustainable standard housing. To summarise the issues thus far;

• Urbanisation is expected on a very large scale in the less and least developed regions.

• There will be a rural depopulation and increase in economic migration to the cities. Combined with a shift from agriculture-based economies to industrial/technological economies leaving a large population of both urban and rural poor.

• Urbanisation is not necessarily an unsustainable pathway but there is a great deal of improvement to be made on the common practices to date.

• There is an urgent need to develop technologies and polices that will speed up retro-fitting in the existing urban areas.

A mechanism that will both support the retrofitting of urban areas and provide support to the rural communities needs more dimensions that are currently being applied. Payment for ecosystem services is a mechanism that is beginning to gain in application and acceptance. It has been applied in the form of water credits and in carbon credits, but is application on a global scale still remains very small. The following suggestion must be partially credited to Peter Head from ARUP, in a discussion with the author. The common resource exchanges between rural and urban areas, and the resource issues often approached creatively in the new build cities are food, energy and waste. A mechanism to bring a more balanced relationship between the urban community and rural community might be to fix these exchanges more formally. The mechanism is proposed as follows: A part of a city is linked with a specific rural community in the project along with a single investor such as a “green investment bank”.

• The investor funds the development of renewable energy facility in the rural community near the city.

• The renewable energy scheme will include waste to energy, anaerobic digestion etc to handle the waste from the city.

• The urban community sends its combustible and compostable waste to the rural community to feed the energy plant and fertilise the land for food.

• The rural community pledges to sell the electricity and food to the urban community who in turn are obliged to buy the energy but at a rate lower than their current supplier.

• The investor provides the capital for the retrofit programme in the urban community for energy and water efficiency.

• The rural community will guarantee other ecosystem services (access, water, carbon etc) in return for a payment.

Benefits:

• The investor receives interest on the capital outlay through carbon credits, and cost savings agreements with the urban community and a profit share on the renewable energy with the rural community.

• The rural community has a guaranteed income from energy production, and food production

• The urban community has a lower cost of living, a better living standard and surroundings and a traceable food supply and resilience from energy poverty.

• The recycling of resources will reduce the city’s ecological footprint. • The economy becomes more localised, and the poverty issues are reduced in

the peri-urban area. • Poverty reduction is targeted at the poor and does not add the economic

growth of the rich corporation/institutions.

Figure 5: Diagrammatic representation of supply relationship between urban and rural community and green investment bank. The pre-conditions for success of such a programme will include: The scheme must be applied to specific and identifiable communities; it will not work as a diffuse model. The scheme requires a contract that is willingly entered into by all

of the parties. If the arrangement is too flexible with regard to buying services elsewhere the project will fail through leakage of finances and becoming non-viable from one of the suppliers point of view. Furthermore, the empirical evidence of cost savings to homeowners through adopting new technologies is not enough of a motivating factor in supporting and using retrofitted technology by those residents. There are other social barriers that slow down or prevent the application of new technology. These must be addressed before the contract is made. A single investor (green bank or development corporation) would be better to ensure that losses and gains from either the rural or urban community can be balanced. The profitability of the entire contract can be assisted by policy interventions such as participation in carbon markets, feed-in tariffs for renewable energy and some broader payment for ecosystem services. Discussion: As a model mechanism, the model follows the principles of the Ecosystem Approach with the values of localism, societal choice, internalising costs, sharing costs and benefits, working at an appropriate ecosystem scale and being multi-disciplinary. The model defines and values the relationship between the urban and rural areas and begins to tackle the fundamental resource issues of urbanisation. The fuzzy and dynamic boundary between urban and rural is where much of the physical activity will take place in such as scheme. It would be a challenge in setting the right scale for the project in terms of services offered to and from the participating areas and for the capital funds needed for the retrofitting. The circumstances of the local economy will dictate the degree of retrofitting that might take place. The model assumes a reasonably developed city with inhabitants of higher material and energy demands. The model might not work in trying to improve or retrofit a slum where the energy demands and the differences in savings and income before and after the scheme may not be enough to service the capital investment. In these cases other more direct interventions will be needed. Recommendations for future work. For such a model to be applied, the social implications from an urban and rural point of view need to be explored. An application for the model in the deep poverty areas might be researched through a research programme such as the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council’s “ecosystems and poverty alleviation” programme. References

1. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs/Population Division 5. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wup2007/2007wup.htm

2. Lovelock J, 2006, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back and How We Can Still Save Humanity. ISBN 9780141025971

3. http://www.sos2006.jp/english/rsbs_summary_e/5-are-we-living-beyond-earths-capacity.html 4. Committee ion Climate Change, 2009,UPTAKE OF ENERGY EFFICIENCY IN

BUILDINGS, http://hmccc.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/Element%20Energy_final_efficiency_buildings.pdf

5. Olympic Delivery Authority, 2008, Olympic Park Biodiversity Action Plan

6. DfiD 2010, Cities the New Frontier