City-Level Decoupling-Full Report

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

8 Conclusions and policy recommendations

energetic society, making them sites of social debate and innovation.

At a time when the majority of the world’s population lives in cities and the bulk of economic activity is concentrated in urban areas, cities must be given priority as the building blocks of a socially inclusive global green economy. Cities are the spatial nodes where the major global and national resource flows connect as resource inputs, stocks and outputs (goods, services and wastes). They also act as both a major market for those in their surrounding wider region who supply the cities with goods and services and as a major threat because cities pollute the environment. Unsurprisingly, as cities change they may affect their rural environs in both negative and positive ways. One possibility is that demand for goods and services supplied by rural areas may decline as intra-urban food production or recycling building wastes increases. Another more positive possibility is that cities might minimize negative environmental impacts. Finally, cities are where ecology meets the

This general conclusion, however, must be translated into strategies and actions that are aimed at minimizing environmental damage (impact decoupling) and maximising the potential of sustainable resource use (resource decoupling). Cities will undoubtedly be fundamentally restructured over the coming decades in response to many of the macro-dynamics discussed in this report, but also to the micro-dynamics of changes in consumption, cultural behaviours and technologies. To translate this into a practical programme, the focus should be on direct and indirect material flows and how urban infrastructures can be reconfigured to significantly improve resource productivity (by a factor of at least five), as well as on radically reorienting resource use by substituting non- renewables with renewable resources.

Resource substitution, with regard to resources like metals and food, has its limits. Supplies of metals are finite, which means prices will rise over time as deposits are exploited that are of lower and lower quality. Substitutes for steel, for example, might need to be found. Similarly, the key flows of food are not as conditioned by urban infrastructures as are the flows of water, sanitation, solid waste and energy. Rising transport costs and soil

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