City-Level Decoupling-Full Report

City-Level Decoupling: Urban resource flows and the governance of infrastructure transitions

given to the fact that the design, construction and operation of energy, waste, water, sanitation and transport infrastructures create a socio-technical environment that shapes the 'way of life' of a city’s residents and how they procure, use and dispose of the resources they require. Environmental education and pricing mechanisms aimed at changing consumer behaviour are helpful, but when people are locked into infrastructures that influence certain behaviours, such as the absence of a separated waste recycling system, or alternatives to commuting via private vehicle, significant change is unlikely. Where much of the population is poorly serviced by infrastructure networks, as is the case in many of the fast-growing cities in developing countries, opportunities exist to design and build new infrastructures that avoid the resource- and energy-intensive approaches typical of many cities in developed countries. Indeed, continuing a business-as-usual approach in cities in developing country may well result in rising costs that will reinforce the exclusion of the urban poor even more than is the case today. As cities have grown, mainstream thinking on urban development and planning has increasingly acknowledged the link between human and natural environments. These issues have been explored in a range of 'City Reports' that have sought a synthesis of current thinking about the relationships between urbanisation and ecological change (Box 1.1). Although they had different emphases, all the recent mainstream reports recognise the links between urbanization, urban development, climate change, urban infrastructure, ecosystem services and natural resources. They call for interventions that achieve a balance between urban economic development, long-term ecological sustainability and social justice. The challenge is how to facilitate such city transitions. This report assesses socio-metabolic flows and the urban infrastructures that conduct these flows, leading to advice on how to meet this challenge in practical ways.

cities, with 60% produced in 600 of the most productive cities where one fifth of the world’s population now lives. • A second major wave of urbanisation is underway: since 2007 the majority of the world’s population of over 7 billion people has been classified as living in urban settlements, with a projected growth of 4 billion urban dwellers taking place in developing world cities between 1950 and 2030. concentrated in cities: by the year 2005, approximately 75% of global energy and material flows were consumed in cities, which covered just 2% of the land. Given that many of the resource flows on which cities depend are finite, it follows that continuing global economic growth will depend on the decoupling of this growth from escalating resource use. However, resource flows through modern cities have typically assumed a never-ending supply of resources, so decoupling will require innovation for more efficient management of resource flows. The cases reported here confirm that this can be done with active support for sustainability- oriented innovations, including the re- organisation of governance institutions. This report builds on the insights of many previous reports that found cities to be an important dimension of the transition to a green economy. Its strategic focus is on the resource flows through cities and the infrastructures that have been – or should be - configured to conduct these flows . Because this theme has not been addressed in most reports on sustainable cities, inadequate attention has been paid to the economics of reconfiguring urban infrastructures whose construction and maintenance are, in turn, often the largest expenditures at the city government level. Traditionally, sustainable cities reports have focused on spatial factors (e.g. densities, mobility), energy supplies and energy efficiency, congestion, greening, pollution, wastes, and consumption behaviour. Insufficient attention has been • Global resources consumption is

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