The Keene Lectures 2004
'What will the world be like in 2020?'
delivered by Professor David Goode
Advisor on the Environment to the Greater London Council
in Chelmsford Cathedral
Lecture Three:
Wednesday 17th November 2004
'Sustainable Cities'
What will the world be like in 2020?
The Keene Lectures 2004
This year we have been proud to host a series of lectures which were both expert and relevant to public interest and personal faith. Four speakers were invited to address the question 'What will the world be like in 2020?' from the perspective of their professional expertise: a futurologist, a theologian, an ecologist and an ethicist. In order of delivery, they were:
Mr Ian Pearson, Research Futurologist with British Telecom
The Rt Rev James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool
Professor David Goode, Adviser on the Environment to the Greater London Council
Dr Robert Song, Senior Lecturer in Ethics, University of Durham
The result was an array of daunting scenarios, with few guarantees that life as we know it will continue or be sustainable in the long-term. These transcripts are offered to enable further reflection and to provide a cameo of our turn-of-the-century apprehensions. As Robert Song pointed out, the future is shaped by people like ourselves. Much depends on the clarity of our understanding and the courage of our response.
We are indeed grateful for the bequest in memory of John Henry Keene which provides for these public lectures to be offered free of charge.
Andrew Knowles
Canon Theologian
November 2004
KEENE LECTURE THREE
Wednesday 17th November 2004
'Sustainable Cities'
Professor David Goode
Professor David Goode has worked for many years as a professional ecologist, his interests ranging from conservation of threatened habitats to the complexities of urban sustainability. Most recently he served as Head of Environment at the Greater London Authority developing Mayor Ken Livingstone's environmental strategies.
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It's a great honour for me to be invited to be one of the Keene lecturers this year. It's a pleasure to be in such a wonderful cathedral. I was particularly inspired by the Tree of Life, which I suppose makes me feel at home as an environmentalist.
I'm going to try to give you a flavour of what I think is the greatest problem facing humanity over the next 30-50 years, and I'm going to start with a metaphor. In the room which is the parliament building in the main square of Siena, there is a wonderful fresco which was actually produced in 1338. It shows the effects of good governance in the town and countryside. There is, on the opposite wall, a fresco depicting the effects of bad governance, and in the end wall there is a picture of the government - five men sitting on what look like royal thrones at the end of a small room. This always made a big impression on me because you can imagine when Siena was a city state in the 1200s, 1300s, you were faced with warring factions between different cities: Florence and Siena, and elsewhere. There was a very definite sense of integrity in the areas around individual cities. From our perspective I think it's interesting to look at this and say, 'What could people see of their lands from the city wall?' In a sense, what they were looking at out there – the olive groves, the meadows, the trees, the forests, the hay meadows - determined whether there was going to be prosperity in the city, and whether they were all in good heart. That prosperity enabled Siena to develop its culture, its economics and so on. I do believe in those times it was possible for a government to actually look at the land on which it was dependent and to actually put right things that were going wrong. It's a very different situation today. I will come back to this metaphor of Siena and whether we can see what we're doing in terms of the environment or not.
The trend to urbanisation
This is a graph showing the growth of the urban population from 1950 to 2030. This is the global population. The non-urban population of the world is not predicted to rise over this next 30 years or so. From the year 2000 there is a steady rise in the urban population amounting to a further 2 billion - something in the region of 6 billion to over 8 billion people worldwide. The majority of that growth is going to be in the urban areas. Interestingly, if we look back only 50 years to 1950, you will see that the total urban population now is greater than the total world population then. That is a staggering increase, and that is the nature of the changes that we are seeing going on.
From1950 through to 2030 the percentage of the world population which is urban is going to rise from about 30% up to about 60%. The urbanisation in the developed world – ourselves, North America, Europe and other parts of the developed world - shows a percentage which in 1950 was something over 60% is now over 80%, gradually flattening off for many countries in the developed world. Most interesting of all is that in 1950 the percentage of the urban population of the undeveloped, the developing world, the South, was less. It was about 18%. It is predicted to go up to something in the region of just less than 60% by 2030. In another 30 years the urban population percentage will be the same as it was in the developed world in 1950. If you can imagine that, it means there will be a huge population living in towns and cities throughout the world. It doesn't matter where you go, whichever part of the world you're in. Those statistics are frightening enough in terms of the way things are going. But the numbers of big cities is also growing, so that whereas in 1950 there was only one city with more than 10 million, and that was New York, the projection for 2015 is that there will be 21 cities of over 10 million and another 37 with between 5 and 10 million. Places like Sao Paulo, Mexico City and others which are immense cities, some of them exceeding 20 million people, pose all kinds of environmental and social problems. This picture of Europe at night, in a way sums it up. It's a kind of new form of galaxy that we have here. Chelmsford is somewhere there just on the fringe of London, and you can see the motorways of Belgium extremely clearly, and a big concentration over there which is Moscow.
Urbanisation is the biggest change that's going to happen over this next 30-50 years, and we've got to come to terms with that. We are seeing a very definite transformation of human society and this first part of the 21st century will witness the final stages of that inexorable change.
Two agendas
There has been a whole series of international summit meetings which have captured people's imagination and been really important in setting a new dynamic. The Stockholm Conference of 1972 was particularly good because it led to a small book called Only One Earth, a popular version of the conference proceedings produced by Rene Dubois and Barbara Ward which asked 'What are the issues for the world in terms of environment?' As you go through all the different summits that there have been, you'll find there are two kinds of things being looked at – one is human settlement, which is Vancouver and Istanbul in 1970, and the other is the environment, like the Rio Conference and also the World Conservation Strategy that was published in 1980. These different approaches have to a large degree been dependent on different sets of people; different people have been contributing. I would argue that there have been two agendas here.
The first one, the environment agenda, has involved all kinds of environmental scientists, foresters and people dealing with water resources and fisheries. The human settlement agenda is that which is dealing with the areas where people live, whether towns or cities or villages. The kinds of problems that are facing the professionals in these two agendas are very different, and I'd like to elaborate on that.
When you're talking about environment, pollution of water or air pollution, the problems of resources in terms of fish stocks, global warming and all of these things, they are now household words, which they weren't in 1980. They were just creeping in, in terms of the political agenda. All those issues are things which biologists and resource managers have been dealing with for the last 50 years. And equally the urban development agenda has been going for a very long time. You can go back to the Greeks and the Romans for developing cities and coming to terms with how we design cities and ideal conditions for people to live. It is only in the last perhaps 10 years that those two agendas and mindsets have really come together, with the realisation that we have to think ecologically and environmentally in how we design cities and how people live and how we use resources.
Since the Rio Conference, in 1992, we have seen a real change with the Agenda 21 Project. There were certainly many examples at the local level throughout Britain of the ramifications of the Rio Conference, and I'm sure there were some of those in Chelmsford. I think that has actually brought new concepts to the planning and management of towns and cities which we wouldn't have had otherwise. The whole idea of sustainable development, being based on social, economic and environmental issues equally, makes people think when they are dealing with, say, the architecture or sewage disposal or whatever they have to take account of. Now that's an ideal, but at least it does start to make people pay attention across the range of different issues.
Towns like Chelmsford, as well as big cities, can equally make a contribution to the future of the world in terms of environment and the long-term sustainability. It's in our hands, not in the hands of people out somewhere in the tropical rain forest or in other parts of the world where there is a loss of biodiversity. The issue is deeply rooted in the way we live in both the developed and the developing world. Because the majority of us are now living in cities or urban areas, I would argue that it is ourselves who are the people who are actually going to determine what happens in the long term by the life style we live or the kind of way in which we design our living areas.
Cities as solutions
Now, how can cities offer solutions? When I say cities I mean all kinds of scale of urban development. Certainly eco-efficiency is something which is now catching on a great deal. Also re-establishing links between people and the natural world within the urban environment is probably as fundamental as anything. There is a grave danger that people who live in the vast mega-cities of the world will have no understanding whatsoever of their dependence on the natural resources on which they are ultimately totally dependent. Those linkages, I believe, are as important in Mexico City or Sao Paulo or Santiago, Chile, where I've worked, as they are here in terms of the parks and open spaces and so on that we are all familiar with in the UK. It is possible to develop local solutions through local communities, of which I think we've got lots of examples. There is a real possibility of political leaders of different levels actually providing the leadership which can carry others with them and this is something I believe very strongly we now see happening. I saw it happening in Johannesburg and it was a most interesting insight into the way you can actually make progress. Forcing the pace and influencing national agendas and even international agendas can be done by people from the cities rather than from the national government.
This next diagram is intended to indicate a kind of linear process that you get in a large city or big town, where almost everything that comes in that you are dependent on, whether it's energy or food or paper or whatever, come in at one side, and that which you don't need goes out the other end as rubbish. If it's not rubbish that's dumped somewhere, then it's possibly carbon dioxide or nitrogen oxides which go up into the atmosphere and cause problems with air quality. That is the typical model of the Western developed cities. The lower part of this diagram is my view of the world, as an ecologist, showing how most ecological systems have automatic feedback loops and compensating mechanisms to maintain stability and sustainability in the long term. It's a feature of natural systems that there are things like decomposers, little grubby things that wander around in the soil decomposing things, which are absolutely crucial to the system. Those decomposers are eaten by other animals in the food chain and the whole thing basically just looks after itself. Most habitats are self-sustaining. If there is an ecologist in the audience, you will, I am sure, give me examples of where they don't work, but on the whole natural systems do have a self-sustaining system in the long term.
What I'm showing here is the fact that our systems that we've built, that we live in, don't have that. We're so dependent on engineering artificial solutions, that we don't see it necessary to do that circularity that's inherent in the bottom of the diagram. I'm arguing, as I have been for the last 4 years in London, that we need to do more than just recycle paper and bottles. We really need to think how you manage the whole of a big city to actually turn it into a system that works ecologically instead of being simply input and output of the wastes. That, if you like, is one of the tenets of my argument: in the long term we've got to learn to be much more akin to the natural world in the way we do things.
The example of London
I can speak for London because I've been working on the development of the ecological strategies and environmental strategies for 4 years there. One thing we did was an ecological footprint. We looked at the whole of London, what goes into London and what goes out, how much is used and what's the total impact on the earth. We found that the total ecological footprint was 293 times the size of London. The productive area needed to support London is the size of Spain. Now that might seem inconceivable, but it's not unusual. It's certainly typical of most European and North American cities of that scale. What does that represent on a world scale in terms of Europe and North America? The proportional use of the earth's resources is colossal. But for the first time we started to identify where we could make changes to a place like London, and you could do exactly the same thing for Chelmsford. You could actually reduce the ecological footprint by doing certain things, whether it be the use of energy or reducing the amount of water that's used or the inflow of building materials or whatever. These are the different imports and exports - and the amount of carbon dioxide that's being produced is of course the key issue in global climate change. This picture is the summary of the resource flows through London, but I would like to emphasize you could do this for anywhere and it is happening now for many towns in the UK. The Isle of Wight as an entity has had it done, which has been very effective. The per capita footprint for Londoners is about 6.63 hectares. I hate hectares but it's the amount in global terms of the land that's available on earth that is productive, and in terms of the amount that Londoners use it's 6.63. The global earth share for the 6 billion people living on earth is actually 2.18 global hectares. If everybody had the same resources equally, if we had an equal sharing out of resources, then everybody would get 2.18. So Londoners need three earths to sustain their lifestyle, and I'm quite sure you people are probably living in a similar way. Three earths' resources if everybody on earth is going to be living at the same level. So we have some issues of inequity.
Now, what can we do, and why am I saying that cities should be the solution to this problem? Well, there are some interesting features of big cities, and if the majority of the world population is moving into urban areas and these urban areas are getting bigger, there are some advantages. The economies of scale that actually exist in large, relatively compact cities, will actually result in some benefits, and certainly in terms of city metabolism, if I can use that phrase. Thinking as an ecologist, you can start to make changes in that metabolism and how the body of the city works more efficiently and more effectively in a higher density city. The use of the different forms of transport is one of the possibilities. There are all kinds of possibilities for things like community heating schemes, which are infinitely more effective than we are using at the moment. And certainly waste management is an absolutely huge area, which we can address, which will help us to reduce our ecological footprint.
This graph is showing the amount of petrol used per capita in different cities around the world, and comparing it with the city's density. To the right hand end of this graph are very high density cities like Hong Kong, and at the left hand end of the graph there are very low density cities like Houston in Texas and Phoenix in Arizona – big American cities where you drive for miles to get from your house to the shop. So at the top left you've got a whole host of North American cities, all of which are using something like four times the fuel to travel that we do in Europe. It probably isn't true in detail, but I think it gives you a good picture in broad terms of the sort of thing that's going on. If you look at the centre of Houston, it's nearly all car park, because they've driven in from way out of town and everybody has to be able to walk no more than one block or half a block from the car park to the office. If you fly over the middle of Houston it's just car park after car park, and then these big blocks going up into the sky. This is very different from places like Strasbourg, London or Copenhagen, where you've got a moderate density and a lot of public transport: the sort of places a lot of people want to live, and using only a quarter of the fuel of a place like Houston. Shanghai was a relatively low-density and low-level city for a while, but now springing up with huge high-density buildings at astonishing speed - probably one of the most rapidly changing environments on earth at the moment, the East China area, and particularly Shanghai. Sadly nearly everything they are building is traditional architecture of the kind that you would find in any Western city, or in Singapore or any of the Australian cities. There is hardly any use of passive solar gain or means of producing heating or ventilation or cooling by solar energy, and almost every feature of these buildings uses energy from fossil fuels. When I spoke to the mayor of Pudong in Shanghai, he said, 'We're going to use the cleanest energy', which meant gas, not coal; but nothing more technical than that. It's a new city that's been built there, like Manhattan, and that's what's going to happen more and more in China.
A model produced by a British architect for Pudong as one of the possibilities for the way forward, was sadly not taken up by the Pudong authorities and put on the shelf. It would have made a 70% saving in energy use because of the way it was designed, using all forms of inbuilt solar gain. This was Richard Rogers' design, which he referred to in his Reith Lectures a few years ago. It's a classic example of someone producing the ideas and the solutions but they're not ready for it at the time. Very sadly we see a mega-city going up which is going to be producing a major contribution to global warming.
Another potential that I'm talking about in big cities and even small towns is community heating. Woking, in Surrey, has had a community heating scheme introduced at the local level, and is actually independent of the national grid in some respects, and using hydrogen fuel cells. If they can do it, all kinds of towns, certainly a place the size of Chelmsford, could be doing that. The person responsible for taking forward all that work in Woking has now been taken on in London by the mayor, leading on the new climate change agency for London. From small things in one place you can move on into bigger things; so that gives you some idea of the potential capacity.
The interesting thing about that job in London is that the Greater London Authority Act required the mayor to produce a set of long-term strategies, looking 20-30 years ahead, and saying how we should be running London in that sort of time scale. He was required to produce a set of strategies on overall planning, called the London Plan. It was called the Spatial Development Strategy, but it doesn't mean any more than simply a plan for London. There was a transport strategy, an economic development strategy, and also a culture strategy. Sitting alongside those there were four environmental strategies, on waste, air quality, biodiversity and noise.
Energy Strategy
The first meeting I had with Ken Livingstone after the election in 2000, I suggested to him that we should also have an energy strategy, because if you're going to combat global warming and climate change issues, you've really got to know what you're doing in terms of energy use. He was totally with me on that. Within ten minutes we'd talked it through and agreed we were going to produce an energy strategy, which caused some consternation to the chief officer at the time. But that was a political decision that was made very quickly and I was delighted that it was, because it formed the very real basis for taking things forward. The London Plan is a pretty far-sighted document, looking forward 20 or more years, and the vision is to develop London as an exemplary sustainable world city, based on economic growth, social inclusiveness and fundamental improvements in London's environment and use of resources. One of the integral features of the Act that set it all up, said 'You will produce these strategies. They will all be consistent between each one and one with another.' That was a very short phrase in the Act, but it has huge consequences. I don't think any national government or city government anywhere has ever produced a total policy in which all aspects of social, economic and environmental policy are consistent with one another. It's just never been done. The Act said it will be done, and it was very interesting to try and actually make those things happen.
Another feature of the Act was that no decisions would be made without considering the effect on Sustainable Development in the UK. If you were going to make a decision, you had to demonstrate that it was the best in the light of sustainable development, so there is a real onus on the mayor and the political machinery to be thinking about Sustainability in the long term. So something like waste management, instead of being seen as simply a problem (have we got enough wheelie bins or should we be doing more recycling?), we really have to start addressing in a big way and asking, what are the long-term solutions - in terms of Sustainability? We were faced with something like 17 million tonnes of waste being produced, with an increase year on year of something in the order of 3% and European Union directives saying we will not be able to send stuff to landfill after 2010. Eventually there will be an absolute embargo on landfill, so no longer will London be sending its rubbish out into Essex and Bedfordshire and other places. It will have to stop doing that, and somehow have to manage its refuse within the boundaries of London. One of the ways of doing that is to increase the overall recycling.
Recycling
When I started out, Recycling was running at about 8% average for London, and some of the boroughs were as low as 2% of household waste being recycled. When you compare that with some of the European countries – Germany and Denmark and Holland – it is absolutely appalling. They're on something like 40% or 50% for the equivalent types of rubbish in terms of recycling, and some of the London boroughs are on 2%. I don't actually know what Chelmsford achieves, but I'm sure you're higher than that. The London average has now gone up to about 11% and they're expecting to hit somewhere in the region of 14% by next year. It's gradually creeping up, but is required to hit something in the order of 25% by 2006. That still is far too low. We really need to be hitting figures of 40% or 50% by 2010, and there's going to be an awful lot of work needed to do that. It isn't really just a matter of thinking what machinery can you use. You've got to think from one end of the picture: how can we ensure that everybody is producing stuff in a way that's easily recycled? Having kerbside collections is all very boring, but it's fundamental to the answers. We've got to be able to use materials again in some way instead of just dumping them.
At the moment in London, 72% of the rubbish goes into holes in the ground. That's a total waste. All those materials can be used again for other purposes. If it's plastic, there's no reason why the plastic shouldn't be going to a plastics factory and recycled and used again. The idea is to try to set up one of these ecological systems of recycling whereby you don't dispose of anything. You make sure it's going into the right process and coming back again in some other form. That is called a Secondary Materials Economy, and is extremely valuable. People who are in the know are making money out of it, and in some of the poorer cities of the world, the very poor urban dwellers are living on it. Places like Sao Paulo don't actually have a waste problem because it's all being recycled by the people at the bottom of the heap. I'm not suggesting that's the answer, but they are certainly aware of the value.
There are many other ways in which this process works. I was reading a wonderful article recently about the Mafia in Southern Italy, buying all the land for landfill. They've taken over the whole of the waste business, because they know there's money in it. If you actually get this right, there is a real value in the waste products that we're throwing away at the moment.
There have been changes in London and things are improving. We've got new recycling industries. One really fascinating one recycles glass bottles. The bottles are ground up to make little glass granules, which can be used as the basis for making roads or substrate for all kinds of building activities. If you mix the granules with rubber from discarded tyres, you get a new form of road material called glassphalt, which forms a really smooth road surface which is not noisy. So you have a win-win-win situation: using glass and the rubber from car tyres to produce a very effective road surface that is cutting down on urban noise. London Remade, which is the entrepreneurial arm of the London Development Agency, has been developing a whole series of new initiatives, with hundreds of people with real entrepreneurial skills to develop the new industries and markets. They've got a market task force and reprocurement training going on - all kinds of things happening that weren't happening four years ago. These are just some examples of the way things can be taken forward.
Climate Change Agency
The energy strategy, I think, is really important. It was intended that we should reduce our dependence on fossil fuel and reduce our effect on global climate change, and also reduce the problems associated with energy use in London, particularly energy poverty amongst the poorest sector of the community. I suspect they will be required to produce something like 10% of the energy within a development itself by solar gain, some form of solar panel on the roof, or other maybe bio-energy systems within the land area of a development. In other words, some form of renewable energy.
Another aspect of this whole approach was to develop a Climate Change Agency in London to secure the investment for these new approaches. London is probably going to be the first city in the world to have such a Climate Change Agency, which will also look at the impact of climate change already built into the system - the potential problems of flooding and the real difficulties that we're going to face with higher summer temperatures which are going to happen. We all saw what happened in Paris last year, and we know that this sort of thing is going to increase. Almost certainly within the next ten years we'll have major episodes of very, very high temperatures in London in the summer months, with people affected in the Underground and in other ways, and elderly people dying, as happened in Paris. That is the projection and I'm convinced that's going to be happening.
So those are the sorts of things that need to be addressed. Other alternatives may seem like science fiction, but we're moving towards these much faster than I would have expected two years ago: things like the Hydrogen Partnership to develop the fuel cell industry; using hydrogen mixed with oxygen can produce electricity. The only by-product is water, so there's no global warming effect. Water vapour – there are three buses in London running on fuel cells with water vapour coming out of the chimney and no other noxious gases, so you reduce the atmospheric pollution and you reduce the effect on the climate in terms of greenhouse gases. Now, I think that's the kind of thing that we're looking for, where we're really finding renewable alternatives rather than still being dependent on fossil fuel energy.
Nature Conservation
Another aspect is the biodiversity strategy. It means effectively Nature Conservation – for me that's the phrase I've always used – and it's worth just looking at what's gone on over the last 20 years in London. When I was first involved, in the early 1980s, there was no mention of ecology or nature conservation in planning in a big city like London. Everybody talked about the value of parks for recreation, but not Nature. Nature was out in the countryside somewhere. Over the last 20 years it's been recognised that Nature actually does occur in a big city like London and it can be accommodated. Gradually over that period we've found a change in the planning system, so that we now have a statutory London plan that says you will protect sites of nature conservation value. That is a very fundamental change and it's something which I've been very pleased to be associated with over that period.
Something like one fifth of London is now designated as areas for nature conservation: areas which are of London-wide significance. Some of them, like Richmond Park, would be protected anyway, but others, like Rainham Marshes would almost certainly have gone to economic development of some kind had it not been for this kind of policy. Some areas in the Lee Valley would, I am sure, have been lost. Those areas represent about 8% of London. Metropolitan sites for nature conservation represent about 8% of London, and then there is a whole series of local sites within each borough. All these add up to 18% of the whole of London, and are now in the London local plans, so every borough plan has them listed.
The whole philosophy is to ensure that people have some contact with Nature in the areas where they live or work. We even have areas of deficiency of nature and local planning officers are busying themselves trying to reduce those. Where you've got a railway line, you find an area of deficiency; you have to go quite a long way before you get to a natural area or a park with decent natural vegetation. But if you had a footbridge over the railway line, you might be able to get to such an area very much more easily just a short distance away. Other areas may be improved as nature reserves, and the London Borough Planning Officers are busy doing it. In the Thames Gateway, especially in relation to the Olympics Bid, there is an awareness of the value of these sites and it is being built into a lot of the work that's going on. I've attended many long meetings discussing the value of open space in those areas.
'Act local'
The thing I would like to just say here is that the top-down framework that's been produced for planning is one thing, the bottom-up is the other. The bottom-up activity from local community groups is absolutely crucial and if you don't have that, you won't get anywhere. You won't get the political votes anyway, and if you don't have the top-down framework for the planning process, the bottom-up process is simply getting frustrated. People are banging their heads against brick walls and not getting anywhere. You've got to have both of those and in this particular case that's what's happened, and it's worked very well.
The sorts of advantages that I've been talking about are that you can have exemplary projects at the local level and strategically across cities. You can also ensure that things in London like BedZed – Beddington Zero Energy Development - can actually be replicated in lots of other places. You need the political leadership and you need to ensure that when various cities and towns are working together, they can draw on examples from different places and be able to demonstrate what actually is good practice. So there are a lot of ways in which cities can actually set the agenda. The Agenda 21 process that many of you will be familiar with has certainly made this work at the local level. We wouldn't be where we are now if that hadn't been happening in the 1990s. The BedZed example actually reduces the demand for energy in that kind of traditional development by something like 40% on power and 10% on heat. It's an ecologically effective building design, and it has all sorts of features built in with bio-mass systems and solar energy.
When the Earth Summit was happening in Johannesburg in 2002 there was the Eco City Development with all kinds of new examples of how to use solar energy in some of the poorest areas of the city. To me, this was very heartening, that one could see ways in which things might start to work more effectively. They had a bicycle co-operative here which was really working, the local community suddenly finding they could be far more mobile with this scheme and it was actually economic for them to be doing that.
The kinds of things that have happened in other cities around the world are really quite enlightening. Jamie Lerner in Curitiba introduced a thing called a Green Exchange. In Cambioverda, you bring in your rubbish in a trolley and get vegetables in exchange, or whatever. You're getting something that you want in exchange for your rubbish. The poorest elements of the community can actually gather material and get an exchange, and that's the way that was working. Equally, he totally revolutionised the public transport system in Curitiba and that's been a model for many developing world cities. Curitiba is often quoted for having these so-called tube systems where you queue for the buses which are just so efficient. It was a remarkable change around from an extremely depressed city to one that worked.
Cities working together
Cities working together can actually start to influence things. I saw this in Johannesburg during the Earth Summit in 2002. We had all these countries in deadlock in the main session, which you heard about in the press: the oil-producing nations against the rest on renewable energy, and you didn't get any progress on renewable energy targets because of that. Colin Powell arrived and claimed the Americans were in favour of renewable energy and everyone booed him. The American delegation had been saying, we are not going to set any targets on renewables and frustrating things for about ten days previously. But in another sector of the conference the cities working together were demonstrating all kinds of ways you can actually make progress, and we learnt a huge amount that could be taken into the international arena. I did hear quite a few of the media commentators saying the city contributions were rather better than the international sessions at Johannesburg.
So I'm going to come back finally to Siena and say perhaps if we think of the scale of towns and cities and local communities, we can provide some of the answers to the next 30 years. And if we don't, I think we're going to be in big trouble.
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Wendy Boulton: Thank you for a really interesting lecture which I thoroughly enjoyed. When you say a very large number of cities are going to be over ten million people in the future, I did wonder whether any thought had been given to climate change in that respect, considering that quite a number of cities are actually quite close to sea level.
David Goode: I think it's a very valid point, and a lot of cities in the developing world are going to be severely threatened by climate change, particularly the rise in sea level and the potential for flooding. In Bangladesh and other places we've seen it already. There are a lot of cities at sea level simply because of the way they have developed in the past, very many of them as ports, and therefore they're going to be subject to real problems. So you're quite right, and there's no question, people have got to address that, and start accepting a built-in sea level rise due to the expansion of the oceans over the next twenty years. If we can reduce the amount of greenhouse gases being produced we will ameliorate but we're not going to stop that. People will have to adjust to that new situation, and pretty quickly. We are certainly going to have to look again at the Thames Barrier in the UK and other areas of flood defences in the South East of England in particular.
Wendy Boulton: In waste there's no emphasis on reducing packaging at source, and I think that we need to look at this and not smash all our bottles but re-use them.
David Goode: I'm absolutely with you. I didn't go into all details on the waste strategy in London, but the whole issue of packaging is one that's very much wrapped up with national legislation. That's something which is being addressed, but it has a longer time period. The mayor could do certain things very quickly on recycling in terms of how it's dealt with in London, but trying to get national legislation changed means he's got to be talking with Government and with others, and we've also got the European directives on that. There will be changes in relation to packaging, and I regard it as equally important. If we don't reduce that, we're in big trouble, so the 3% increase year on year is something we're living with.
Wendy Boulton: Is the Thames Gateway Project going to be like Shanghai in that we're losing a lot of opportunities for it to be sustainable?
David Goode: I don't think we are. We fortunately have now reached a stage where the architects and the development industry in the UK are much more aware of sustainable design and construction than four years ago. If we had been building things in the Thames Gateway in the 90s in the way that we're going to be over the next 6-10 years, I think we would have lost out in a big way, but because we have learned a lot over this period and because there's a momentum going on about climate change and energy consciousness, I think we'll see a big shift in the way things are done. I'm an optimist on this. The London Sustainable Development Commission is addressing this, producing guidelines on the built environment and on processes for sustainability within the development. A lot of the house builders and the development agency people are involved directly in that. We're certainly not going to be replicating the kind of thing that they've done in Pudong.
Wendy Boulton: How are we going to feed these massive urban populations when everybody's moving off the land?
David Goode: I don't have an answer on the issue of food. Food is now globalised, in the way that we obtain food from all over the world, and there are going to be some big questions to do with food miles: where we are getting our food from and the energy involved in transport. We grow herbs for the supermarket in Britain and put them on an aeroplane because it's cheaper to pack them in East Africa. They pack them in East Africa and send them back to Sainsbury's or Tesco's. The food miles involved in that, the energy involved, is utterly nonsensical, and is the kind of thing that's got to be addressed as far as Western living is concerned.
We have to start to think again about things like farmers' markets and local food supply, local provenance. But the bigger question is the whole economy of the rural areas of the developing world, where the economics have changed so dramatically. The rural poor are now extremely poor, but they are the people on whom the others are dependent for their food supply. This is happening in China now, and there is a real difficulty here. I'm not an expert on that issue.
Unidentified speaker: It is very nice to talk about the environment, but many people are actually not willing to join in on any socio-economic issues until they have the house and they have their own house or place to live.
David Goode: The British Trust for Conservation Volunteers runs a whole lot of schemes. Some of them are to do with nature conservation. Some of them may be actually getting people involved in local community action to improve the local neighbourhood. The environmental benefits of these schemes are only part of the equation, and I've had it said to me quite often by the people who run them that the real value is the social contact that the people make – because they suddenly find themselves in a group that has a similar interest and they get going. I think that's tremendously valuable. It's certainly happening in a lot of places, particularly in inner London.
Unidentified speaker: I'm a local vicar. Are there five things that my church could do? I'm thinking that we might have a herb garden, which would save us buying herbs from South Africa, and then we might set up a green gym or something.
David Goode: If you really want to get something going with the church, there is a wonderful pack the Conservation Foundation has produced, which does the Parish Pump magazine, with a huge list of things that can be done by the local community, and which the church can actually take a lead in: everything from wild flower meadows in the churchyards and biodiversity conservation on your local patch, through to encouraging groups dealing with energy or waste disposal. There are also packs available for parish councils which can be used from the church perspective. I would suggest you contact David Shreeve at the Conservation Foundation, based at the National Geographical Society in London.