Latest Articles by Lester R. Brown

Urbanisation: Designing sustainable cities

Lester R. Brown — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 15:22:00 +0000

Scenes of rural life are fast being replaced by urban sprawl across the world, but the result does not have to be chaos, says Lester Brown, who explains here why Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, is his model city of the future.

As I was being driven through Tel Aviv from my hotel to a conference center a few years ago, I could not help but note the overwhelming presence of cars and parking lots. Tel Aviv, expanding from a small settlement a half-century ago to a city of some 3 million today, evolved during the automobile era. It occurred to me that the ratio of parks to parking lots may be the best single indicator of the livability of a city—an indication of whether the city is designed for people or for cars.

The world’s cities are in trouble. In Mexico City, Tehran, Bangkok, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities, the quality of daily life is deteriorating. Breathing the air in some cities is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day. In the United States, the number of hours commuters spend going nowhere sitting in traffic-congested streets and highways climbs higher each year, raising frustration levels.

Pollution in Shanghai, photo by wjpbennett

In response to these conditions, we are seeing the emergence of a new urbanism. One of the most remarkable modern urban transformations has occurred in Bogotá, Colombia, where Enrique Peñalosa served as Mayor for three years, beginning in 1998. When he took office he did not ask how life could be improved for the 30 percent who owned cars; he wanted to know what could be done for the 70 percent—the majority—who did not own cars.

Peñalosa realized that a city that is a pleasant environment for children and the elderly would work for everyone. In just a few years, he transformed the quality of urban life with his vision of a city designed for people. Under his leadership, the city banned the parking of cars on sidewalks, created or renovated 1,200 parks, introduced a highly successful bus-based rapid transit system, built hundreds of kilometres of bicycle paths and pedestrian streets, reduced rush hour traffic by 40 percent, planted 100,000 trees, and involved local citizens directly in the improvement of their neighbourhoods. In doing this, he created a sense of civic pride among the city’s 8 million residents, making the streets of Bogotá in this strife-torn country safer than those in Washington, D.C.

Enrique Peñalosa observes that “high quality public pedestrian space in general and parks in particular are evidence of a true democracy at work.” He further observes: “Parks and public space are also important to a democratic society because they are the only places where people meet as equals.…In a city, parks are as essential to the physical and emotional health of a city as the water supply.” He notes this is not obvious from most city budgets, where parks are deemed a luxury. By contrast, “roads, the public space for cars, receive infinitely more resources and less budget cuts than parks, the public space for children. Why,” he asks, “are the public spaces for cars deemed more important than the public spaces for children?”

In espousing this new urban philosophy, Peñalosa is not alone. The reform he initiated in Bogotá is being carried on by his successor, Antanas Mockus. Now government planners everywhere are experimenting, seeking ways to design cities for people not cars. Cars promise mobility, and they provide it in a largely rural setting. But in an urbanizing world there is an inherent conflict between the automobile and the city. After a point, as their numbers multiply, automobiles provide not mobility but immobility.

Some cities in industrial and developing countries alike are dramatically increasing urban mobility by moving away from the car. Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, was one of the first to design and adopt an alternative transportation system, one that does not mimic those in the West but that is inexpensive and commuter-friendly. Since 1974 Curitiba’s transportation system has been totally restructured. Although one third of the people own cars, these play a minor role in urban transport. Busing, biking, and walking totally dominate, with two thirds of all trips in the city by bus. The city’s population has doubled since 1974, but its car traffic has declined by a remarkable 30 percent.

Aside from the growth of population itself, urbanisation is the dominant demographic trend of our time. In 1900, 150 million people lived in cities. By 2000, it was 2.9 billion people, a 19-fold increase. By 2007 more than half of us will live in cities—making us, for the first time, an urban species.

In 1900 there were only a handful of cities with a million people. Today 408 cities have at least that many inhabitants. And there are 20 megacities with 10 million or more residents. Tokyo’s population of 35 million exceeds that of Canada. Mexico City’s population of 19 million is nearly equal to that of Australia. New York, São Paulo, Mumbai (formerly Bombay), Delhi, Calcutta, Buenos Aires, and Shanghai follow close behind.

The Author: Lester R. Brown is an internationally renowned environmentalist and author of numerous books, including the recently-released “Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble,” in which the above extract first appears. It is reproduced here with the permission of the Earth Policy Institute where Lester remains as the Founding President.

Homepage photo: Cycle lanes in Bogota, photo by Adriana Henriquez

The price of salvation

Lester R. Brown — Fri, 04 May 2007 11:01:00 +0000

Reversing the devastation of our planet will require a massive international effort and vast sums of money. But, as Lester R. Brown argues, it is not a question of whether we can afford it, but whether we can afford not to stump up.

The health of an economy cannot be separated from that of its natural support systems. More than half the world’s people depend directly on croplands, rangelands, forests and fisheries for their livelihoods. Many more depend on forest products, leather goods, cotton and wool textiles, and food processing for their jobs.

A strategy for eradicating poverty will not succeed if an economy’s environmental support systems are collapsing. No matter how carefully crafted and well-implemented, a poverty-eradication programme will not succeed if croplands are eroding and harvests are shrinking, if water tables are falling and wells are going dry, if rangelands are turning to desert and livestock are dying, if fisheries are collapsing, if forests are shrinking, and if rising temperatures are scorching crops.

Restoring the earth will take an enormous international effort -- one even larger and more demanding than the often-cited Marshall Plan that helped rebuild war-torn Europe. And such an initiative must be undertaken at wartime speed, lest environmental deterioration translates into economic decline, just as it did for earlier civilisations that violated nature’s thresholds and ignored its deadlines.

We can roughly estimate how much it will cost to reforest the earth, protect its topsoil, restore rangelands and fisheries, stabilise water tables and protect biological diversity. Where data and information are lacking, we can fill in with assumptions. The goal is not to have a set of precise numbers, but a set of reasonable estimates for an Earth-restoration budget.

In calculating the cost of reforestation, the focus is on developing countries, since the forested area is already expanding in the northern hemisphere’s industrial countries. We calculate that meeting the growing fuel-wood demand in these countries will require an estimated 55 million additional hectares of forested area.

Anchoring soils and restoring hydrological stability would require roughly another 100 million hectares located in thousands of watersheds in developing countries. Beyond this, an additional 30 million hectares may be needed to produce timber, paper and other forest products. Only a small share of this tree planting is likely to come from plantations. Much will be on the outskirts of villages, along field boundaries, roads, on small plots of marginal land, and on denuded hillsides.

The big success story in addressing deforestation is South Korea, which, over the last 40 years, has reforested its once denuded mountains and hills, using local labour. Other countries -- such as China -- have tried extensive reforestation, but mostly under more arid conditions and with much less success.

Turkey has an ambitious grassroots reforestation programme, as does Kenya, where women’s groups, led by Nobel peace prize winner, Wangari Maathai, have planted up to 30 million trees.

If seedlings cost US$40 (£19) per thousand, as the World Bank estimates, and if the typical planting rate is roughly 2,000 trees per hectare, then seedlings cost $80 per hectare. Labour costs for planting trees are high, but since much would consist of locally mobilised volunteers, we can estimate roughly $400 per hectare, including seedlings and labour. With 150 million hectares to be planted over the next decade, this will come to roughly 15 million hectares per year at $400 each, for a total annual expenditure of $6 billion.

Conserving the earth’s topsoil by reducing erosion to the rate of new soil formation or below, involves two principal steps. One is to retire the highly erodible land that cannot sustain cultivation -- the estimated 10% of the world’s cropland that accounts for perhaps half of all erosion. For the United States, that has meant retiring 14 million hectares (nearly 35 million acres), at a cost of close to $50 per acre or $125 per hectare, for an annual cost approaching $2 billion.

The second initiative consists of adopting conservation practices on the remaining land that is subject to excessive erosion -- that is, erosion that exceeds the natural rate of new soil formation. The initiative includes incentives to encourage farmers to adopt conservation practices, such as contour farming, strip cropping and, increasingly, minimum-till or no-till farming.

In expanding these estimates to cover the world, it is assumed that roughly 10% of cropland is highly erodible and should be planted to grass or trees before the topsoil is lost and it becomes barren land. In both the US and China, the two leading food-producing countries -- which account for one-third of the world’s grain harvest -- the official goal is to retire one-tenth of all cropland.

In Europe, it probably would be somewhat less than 10%, but in Africa and the Andean countries it could be substantially higher. For the world as a whole, converting 10% of cropland that is highly erodible to grass or trees seems a reasonable goal. Since this costs roughly $2 billion in the US -- which represents one-eighth of the world’s cropland area -- the total for the world would be roughly $16 billion a year.

Assuming that the need for erosion-control practices for the rest of the world is similar to that in the US, we again multiply the US expenditure by eight to get a total of $8 billion for the world as a whole. The two components together -- $16 billion for retiring highly erodible land and $8 billion for adopting conservation practices -- give an annual total for the world of $24 billion.

For cost data on rangeland protection and restoration, we turn to the United Nations plan of action to combat desertification. This plan, which focuses on the world’s dryland regions -- containing nearly 90% of all rangeland -- estimates that it would cost roughly $183 billion over a 20-year restoration period, or $9 billion per year. The key restoration measures include improved rangeland management, financial incentives to eliminate overstocking, and revegetation with appropriate rest periods, when grazing would be banned.

This is a costly undertaking, but every dollar invested in rangeland restoration yields a return of $2.50 in income from the increased productivity of the ecosystem. From a societal point of view, countries with large pastoral populations, where the rangeland deterioration is concentrated, are invariably among the poorest.

The alternative to action -- ignoring the deterioration -- brings not only a loss of land productivity, but, ultimately, a loss of livelihood and millions of refugees, some migrating to nearby cities and others moving to other countries.

The restoration of oceanic fisheries centres primarily on the establishment of a worldwide network of marine reserves, which would cover roughly 30% of the ocean’s surface. For this exercise, we use detailed calculations by the conservation biology group at Cambridge University. Their estimated range of expenditures centres on $13 billion per year.

For wildlife protection, the bill is higher. The World Parks Congress estimates that the annual shortfall in funding needed to manage and to protect existing areas designated as parks, comes to roughly $25 billion a year. Additional areas needed -- including those encompassing the biologically diverse hotspots not yet included -- would cost perhaps another $6 billion a year, giving a total of $31 billion.

There is one activity -- stabilising water tables -- where we do not have an estimate, only a guess. The key here is raising water productivity, and for this we have the experience gained, beginning 50 years ago when the world started to systematically raise land productivity.

The elements needed in a comparable water model are research to develop more water-efficient irrigation practices and technologies, the dissemination of these research findings to farmers, and economic incentives that encourage farmers to adopt and use these improved irrigation practices and technologies.

In some countries, the capital needed to fund a programme to raise water productivity can come from cancelling the subsidies that now often encourage the wasteful use of irrigation water. Sometimes, these are power subsidies, as they are in India; other times, they are subsidies that provide water at prices well below costs, as happens in the US. In terms of additional resources needed worldwide, including the economic incentives for farmers to use more water-efficient practices and technologies, we assume it will take additional expenditures of $10 billion.

So we estimate that restoring the earth will require additional expenditure of $93 billion per year. Many will ask if the world can afford this. But the only appropriate question is: can the world afford not to?

Lester R. Brown is president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington. This article is based on a chapter in his new book, Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble. The book can be bought or downloaded at www.earth-policy.org.

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/

Homepage photo by Monkeyc.net