During our most recent class session, we watched a video on the ARC3 (Cities and Climate Change) and learned about the collaborative publication that 106 scholars representing 50 cities came together and completed. This article discusses the issue of how quickly regions are becoming urbanized and the increase in energy consumption (transportation, heating and cooling, economic activity). The article claims that “Southern Africa is considered to be one of the areas at most risk from the impacts of climate change”, which addresses our topic from class: how do they measure risk? Vulnerability? We do not know from this article. It also discusses the potential problems cities will face in terms of droughts, precipitation, sea level rise, and heat waves.
What do you all think about this issue? Will a solution emerge from the individual level or will it have to be a local-national-global effort?
Interesting article! Even though they do point out that cities are in danger, you are right in your assessment of the author failing to list how risk and vulnerability were measured. Perhaps the author was just unaware of how risk and vulnerability were measured, or just did not care enough to find out, which is definitely interesting? I remember Professor McElwee mentioning that these assessments of vulnerability that we talked about in class are still relatively new such that there is no vulnerability fund set up to assist those deemed most vulnerable. In learning what we did, I came to a sort of conclusion that we all just need to find one set of criteria that we can agree on, use it, and move forward, because I feel like we are wasting precious time that could be spent preparing and trying to slow down what is to come in arguing over what the best criteria is to use.
In regards to your questions at the end, again based on what we have learned in class, an individual-local-national-global effort will have to emerge. This is too great of an issue to just ignore and requires everyone’s participation at every level, especially those who are contributing most to the problem.