www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/news/cop27-expectations.html
COP27 Expectations
For COP27, Buildings & Cities presents a series of short, learned commentaries from the built environment community that are primarily aimed at policy makers. These essays reveal the diversity of issues that need to be embraced and, most importantly, point to constructive approaches to climate action.
The range of topics goes from overarching issues (e.g. overconsumption, multilevel governance, intergenerational equity, climate justice, nature-based solutions - to mention only a few) to more specific issues at the levels of cities and buildings. Lessons and actions can be drawn for different actors in central and local governments, the construction industry supply side, NGOs, higher education and civil society.
Each essay focuses and discusses one vital outcome that is needed from COP27 relating to the built environment. This can be a direct aspect of what should be agreed at COP27 or the impact of COP27 at the national or local levels. A variety of perspectives are presented - from different disciplines, geographies and scales. Taken together, this provides a powerful overview of overarching policy issues and the necessary strategic / practical actions at the societal, urban and building levels.
By Jeroen van der Heijden (Victoria University of Wellington)
By Sergio Altomonte (Université catholique de Louvain) & Carlo Altomonte (Bocconi University)
By Mahendra Gooroochurn (University of Mauritius)
By Liane Thuvander (Chalmers University) and Heba A.E.E. Khalil (Cairo University)
Latest Commentaries
Cities-Scale Research to Address Climate Change
Gerald Mills (University College Dublin) considers the big challenges for cities amid global climate change (GCC) and discusses the need for an inter-disciplinary approach among urban climate sciences to overcome obstacles. A distinction is made between global climate science, which focusses on Earth-scale outcomes, and urban climate science, which refers to processes and impacts at city-scales, including buildings, streets and neighbourhoods.
Climate Change, Overshoot and the Demise of Large Cities
William E. Rees (University of British Columbia) explains why urbanisation has been a significant contributor to ecological overshoot (when human consumption and waste generation exceeds the regenerative capacity of supporting ecosystems) and climate change.1 Civil society needs to begin designing a truly viable future involving a ‘Plan B’ for orderly local degrowth of large cities.