This article is part of Politico Global Policy Lab: Living Cities, a collaborative journalism project exploring the future of cities. Chapter 3 of the project is presented by Holcim,
In the beginning, there was an ideal location – the river that made trade possible, the port that replenished the city’s coffers.
In an age of climate change, what once made a city prosperous could render it unusable.
Athens and Rome became major power centers thanks to easily defensible locations on lush plains with temperate climates. Amsterdam, Lisbon, Hamburg and Copenhagen used their coastal settings to dominate global commerce.
Geography made these cities successful, but it is also likely their downfall as the planet warms.
Current estimates suggest that the international community is on the way to miss The Paris Agreement aims to limit global warming to 1.5°C, and that without more intense efforts to cut greenhouse emissions produced by burning fossil fuels, the world is likely to get hotter between 2.6C and 2.9C by the end of the century.
i.e. cities will face Excessive heat, Flooding, storm And Fire – more long term, severe drought And sea level riseon the basis of their location.
But despite the evidence that potentially devastating climate effects are inevitable, few political leaders are doing anything to take seriously what may happen in the next few decades.
“The current location of most cities will not be viable over a multi-century time frame,” said Benjamin Strauss, chief scientist at the research group Climate Central. “For some of them that may even happen in this century.”
going under
The Netherlands knows what it means to face devastating floods: in 1953, over 2,000 people died Due to storm surge in the North Sea.
Politicians have since overseen the construction massive dams and dams To save the citizens from the sea. But current projections of expected sea-level rise as a result of global warming mean that these coastal defenses may soon become redundant.
east-scaled barrier – the largest storm-surge barrier in the country – for example, “was designed to last for 200 years with the expectation that there would be less than half a meter of sea level rise,” said Professor Michiel van Den of Poler “And we already know that, whatever happens, we’re going to exceed that threshold in the coming century,” said Broecke, meteorologist and researcher at Utrecht’s Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research.
Part of the difficulty in designing systems to protect threatened cities is that while there is no doubt that water levels will rise, it is still unclear how quickly this will happen.
Climate Central’s Strauss said, “Imagine a dump truck pulled up in front of your office and dumped a truckload of snow on the street.” While it is possible to estimate how much water will be released when it melts, the “real challenge” is to find out how quickly it will melt.
But if the world warms by 3C, multi-century projections expect sea level rise up to 6 meters,
This would eliminate cities such as Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam. It is also likely to cause destruction to the North Sea ports of Bremen, Hamburg and Copenhagen. in the Mediterranean Sea, already submerged venice And Ravenna would be wiped out, and even large metropolises like Barcelona and Marseille would see whole neighborhoods submerged in water.
Climate Central’s Strauss said, “A top Dutch water expert once told me that a 1 meter rise in sea level is an interesting problem for an engineer, while 2 meters is a problem for a prime minister.” “But 5 metres? Nobody has studied how to defend against that, and while we are not expecting that challenge in this century we can easily face it in the long run.”
scorching hot
While the existential threat posed by rising sea levels may still be decades – if not centuries – away, extreme heat is already putting some cities in Europe at risk.
“The heat waves are already The most direct and major factor in mortalityare much more severe than floods and storms,” said Wolfgang Kramer, research director at the Mediterranean Institute for Biodiversity and Ecology and lead author of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change latest report,
Eleni MirivliThe newly appointed UN chief global warming officer said parts of Europe are headed for a future where “we’re not talking about summers with several nasty heat waves, but long, unbroken periods of intolerable heat”. The seasons are made.” ,
Under current projections for global warming, urban life “starts to look more dire”, said Jos Lelieveld, director of the Department of Atmospheric Chemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and Head of the Department of Environmental Prediction at the Cyprus Institute for Climate and Atmosphere Research. hub. On the 3C of warming, some cities “will have a greater challenge in providing livable conditions for their populations.”
Lack of food and water may even threaten the existence of some cities.
“Cities depend on resources coming from the countryside,” said Jaime Martinez Valderrama, a researcher at Spain’s CSIC Arid Zone Experimental Station. ,desertification And this extreme weather events which are already generating crop failures are going to make the supply of food in the cities more difficult.”
He said higher temperatures and longer droughts mean cities will also struggle to have safe access to water. While coastal cities may be able to use desalination plants to address that challenge, he cautioned that “technology will never be able to solve all of our problems.”
“These solutions are already quite expensive now,” he said. “Water is becoming more and more expensive, which means it’s going to be more expensive to live in places where it’s in short supply.”
The effects of inadequate water supply are already evident in cities in arid regions of southern European countries where population numbers have been has been declining for decadesshe added.
“We are heading towards a future in which parts of Spain may feel like Saudi Arabia in 10 or 15 years. Cities are there, but at a huge cost, it is not clear that we will be able to afford it. Will be able.”
it should (not) be the place
Although the prospect of cities being surrounded by desert or swallowed by water is not implausible, it is not something that receives much mainstream political debate.
Utrecht University’s van den Broeck said the Netherlands had long struggled to accept the existential threat posed by climate change, and that the choices were now being made. analyzed at a technical levelPublic leaders were not eager to talk about the radical measures that might need to be taken.
“This is an issue with development that will last for decades,” van den Broeck said. “Maybe that’s why politicians aren’t discussing it on a daily basis.”
Local and national leaders may be reluctant to touch the subject because none of the solutions are easy — and the prospect of retroactively relocating a city is almost too complicated to contemplate, said Pierre Persigal, a historian who Specialized in urban disasters and calamities. Warwick.
“Rome, Athens and Madrid are going to be increasingly difficult to operate for large parts of the year,” he said. “Those places concentrate political officials, bureaucrats, lobbyists, journalists, people providing services to them, and others who want to enjoy a particular quality of urban life … It is difficult to move those populations elsewhere.” Is.”
Persigal told that after a An earthquake devastated Lisbon in 1755, no one seriously considered relocating the city, despite the fact that it is located in a seismic zone. “Even in places like Athens, which is likely to fail very soonThere would be a reluctance to leave as it would be an existential question for both the city and the state,” he said.
Some Europeans are leaving neighborhoods already exposed to devastating climate effects. in Olbia, Italy about 2,000 people have moved away from parts of the city that are vulnerable to extreme flood events who registered in 2013,
In Spain, Martínez, a desertification expert, said he knows of several families who left the always-hot cities in the south and moved to more temperate municipalities on the north coast. “We blame a lot of things on geopolitical factors, but climate change or environmental degradation is often an underlying issue,” he said.
Johan Verlinde, who managed Rotterdam’s Climate Adaptation Plan As of 2019, said his city is aware that it will have to make tough choices in the years ahead.
“Political terms last for four years, so we never see the problems that are 10 or 20 years ahead,” he acknowledged. “Right now we don’t see the need to move people out of unsafe neighborhoods but in 40, 50, 60 years it will be a problem.”
The crisis is prompting self-discovery at the local level. “Will we continue to renew [the most exposed neighborhoods], Or will we take drastic solutions, evacuate people and make room for water?” Verlinde asked. “We still don’t know if that should happen, but we need to start talking about it now.”
This article is part of Politico Global Policy Lab: Living Cities, Chapter 3 of the project is presented by Holcim, This article was prepared by Politico reporters and editors with complete editorial independence. learn more Regarding editorial content submitted by external advertisers. You can sign up for Living Cities Here,