THE ROLE OF CITIES IN SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

The Role of Cities in Sustainable Development



The Role of Cities in Sustainable Development

Introduction

Cities have been for some time a vital focus of efforts to address anthropogenic global warming through sustainable investment. For instance, a recent report by the United Nations Finance Initiative Environment Program (UNEP FI) on "Cities" offers a convenient highlighting of the key reasons that advocates cite for focusing on urban areas. Cities account for outsized resource consumptionthey are home to 50% of the world's population but account for 75% of the world's carbon emissions and 60-80% of the world's energy consumption.

Rapid urbanization in the world's developing economies is a leading social and environmental macro trend which raises the importance of developing sustainable urban forms amid substantial disparities in wealth and access to opportunity. Already, urban environments across the world both direct and constrain our capacity to respond to issues of resource consumption, carbon emissions, and, more expansively, sustainable human and economic development(www.millenniumassessment.org).

At the same time, cities offer enormous opportunity. The concentration of economic, social, and intellectual activity in close quarters makes cities sources of innovation and diffusion of sustainable practices. There are positive externalities associated with urban economic activity. Well-designed, dense, compact, and connected urban form is tied to more sustainable living patterns. And by virtue of their concentration of people and activity, cities offer scale, the ability to support sustainable investments of the magnitude to make a difference in the face of the immense challenge posed by climate change.

Significance of the Study

The paper analyze how cities paly their critical role in driving the transition towards sustainable development at the global, local and regional levels and how they play their part for promoting the urban eco-systems approach for helping in defining this role. However, the study also argues that the approach of eco-system can inform policy designed for enhancing the involvement of cities to the sustainable development.

Discussion and Analysis

The main research question that guided this study is how and why innovation originates, develops, implements and (maybe) ends in a municipality and in the field of sustainable development? This question is to study the sequence decisions and actions related to the adoption and implementation of this innovation.

Sustainable Development

Economic and population growth, the availability and depletion of resources and the absorbing capacity of the Earth and atmosphere are at the core of discussions and concerns about sustainable development. Concerns about sustainable development have a long history, starting with Thomas Malthus, but the use of the term sustainable development is of fairly recent origin. The term found its use in the mainstream debate with the Brundtland Report, commissioned by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), and was put on center stage during the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED; the Earth Summit), held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. With the limits-to-growth debate, concerns about finite resources and the carrying capacity of the Earth ecosystem had become a main preoccupation, and computer projections of resource consumption established several ...