Kenan Fikri

Metros on frontline

Research Assistant, Metropolitan Policy Program, The Brookings Institute, Jun 06, 11.

Tagged with environment, climate change, urbanism, public policy

As the heat and humidity settle into Washington for the season and the hope that Congress might one day take action to prevent a warming climate melts away, readers can find some relief in a recent spate of reports emanating from across metro America.

Metros, where 84 percent of the nation’s population live and work, will be on the frontlines of adaptation to climate change. Unsurprisingly then, a network of pragmatic metro leaders are taking the adaptation imperative seriously. They’re acting—on data and empirical evidence, no less!—to prepare for a future that will disrupt human geography like nothing in history. Individual metros certainly can’t halt the planet’s warming single-handedly, but they can control their own contribution to the trend and take strides to mitigate its worst effects as they come to ground. And that’s exactly what these reports show they are starting to do.

As our 2008 report Shrinking the Carbon Footprint of Metropolitan America points out, the relative size of the nation’s metropolitan carbon footprints varies tremendously. By and large, metros east of the Mississippi River (excepting large dense metros like New York, Boston, and Chicago) have far larger carbon footprints than those west of the Mississippi. Altogether, the nation’s top 100 metro areas generate 56 percent of the nation’s emissions from residences and vehicles—rendering them accountable for the majority of the nation’s emissions but highlighting their intrinsic efficiency advantages (they house 66 percent of the population) at the same time.

Motivated by the principle that you can’t manage something if you can’t measure it, the global C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, chaired by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and in partnership with the Carbon Disclosure Project, recently released its flagship report in which 36 global cities fully disclose their carbon emissions. The report, which covers Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco in the United States, will inform cities’ emissions-reduction efforts and establish a benchmark for judging the effectiveness of present and future policies.

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Source: The New Republic, June 2, 2011

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