Articles 2020

For the last 80 years, Thwaites has been losing more water through melting than it’s been gaining in snow.Half a metre of sea-level rise would submerge large parts of Asia’s coastal cities including Manila and Bangkok, as well as sizeable chunks of the Netherlands and the east of England. It’s also half of the sea-level rise needed to begin flooding Manhattan.

Heat caused 2,300 deaths across 12 cities, of which 1,500 were down to climate crisis, scientists say

For around 2,000 years, global sea levels varied little. That changed in the 20th century. They started rising and have not stopped since — and the pace is accelerating. Scientists are scrambling to understand what this means for the future just as President Trump strips back agencies tasked with monitoring the oceans.

For those trying to pay attention in our post-truth, post fact-checking brave new world that has such misinformation systems in it, Dr. Rees is a source to consider. The link: Climate Change, Overshoot and the Demise of Large Cities: Why large cities will need to contract or be abandoned altogether

A town hit hard by two hurricanes, downpours and a deep freeze, all in the midst of a pandemic, offers crucial lessons for everyone’s disaster planning and recovery.

Climate scientists have told the Guardian they expect catastrophic levels of global heating. Here’s what that would mean for the planet

EUCityCalc has officially launched its free, open source online platform that allows local councils and other stakeholders to visualise and simulate low-carbon scenarios for their towns and cities, as well as to assess the trade-offs related to available choices.

De recente verwoestende overstromingen in Peking hebben het Chinese “Sponge Cities Project” danig op de proef gesteld. Hoewel de hoofdstad onder het project extreme regenval zou moeten aankunnen, lieten tientallen mensen het leven en moest een gloednieuwe “sponsluchthaven” sluiten.

Meer dan de helft van burgemeesters van grote Europese steden geeft klimaatactie de allerhoogste prioriteit. Dat blijkt uit de resultaten van de Eurocities Pulse-enquête waarin 92 burgemeesters uit 28 landen in Europa werden bevraagd.

Heat and cold are now established health risk factors, with several studies reporting important mortality effects in populations around the world.1, 2, 3 The associated health burden is expected to increase with climate change, especially under the most extreme scenarios of global warming.4, 5 However, robust estimates of excess mortality in the current and future periods are still challenging to obtain due to the numerous factors influencing vulnerability to heat and cold, including climatic, environmental, and socioeconomic conditions.6 These factors represent the main drivers of variation in mortality risks, which have been shown to differ geographically and across age groups.

The problem with American electric vehicles is the same problem as with our gas-powered models: They’re too dang big. The Ford F-150 has been the top-selling automobile in the country for many years, and the electric version — while admittedly quite nifty — weighs 3.25 tons. The new electric Hummer is even more ridiculous, coming in at 9,000 pounds, with a 212-kilowatt-hour battery that weighs more than a Mazda Miata.

Een voormalige stortplaats in Bulawayo maakte plaats voor een moestuin met aquacultuur en bracht zo inspiratie voor de bredere gemeenschap. Het is een voorbeeld van een geslaagd Green Cities-project waarmee de FAO de levenskwaliteit in kwetsbare steden wil verbeteren en stadslandbouw stimuleren.

Community displacement has emerged as an unintended cost of climate resilience efforts. Here’s how cities can boost both livability and equity.

What else is new? Hotspots are getting hotter. The major hotspot in April stretched from Iraq to India and Pakistan, and toward the northeast through Russia (Fig. 1). Temperature exceeded 45°C (113°F) in late April in at least nine Indian cities,[1] on its way to 50°C (122°F) in Pakistan in May,[2] where a laborer says “It’s like fire burning all around” and a meteorologist describing growing heatwaves since 2015 says “The intensity is increasing, and the duration is increasing, and the frequency is increasing.” Halfway around the world, Canada and north-central United States were cooler than their long-term average, but people in British Columbia and northwest United States remember being under their own record-breaking hotspot last summer.

Previous studies show that city metrics having to do with growth, productivity and overall energy consumption scale superlinearly, attributing this to the social nature of cities. Superlinear scaling results in crises called ‘singularities’, where population and energy demand tend to infinity in a finite amount of time, which must be avoided by ever more frequent ‘resets’ or innovations that postpone the system's collapse. Here, we place the emergence of cities and planetary civilizations in the context of major evolutionary transitions. With this perspective, we hypothesize that once a planetary civilization transitions into a state that can be described as one virtually connected global city, it will face an ‘asymptotic burnout’, an ultimate crisis where the singularity-interval time scale becomes smaller than the time scale of innovation. If a civilization develops the capability to understand its own trajectory, it will have a window of time to affect a fundamental change to prioritize long-term homeosta

Bien qu’elles ne représentent que 4 % de la surface totale de l’Union européenne, les agglomérations concentrent 75 % de sa population et 70 % des émissions de dioxyde de carbone (CO2). Horizon Europe compte notamment sur les smart cities pour baisser ce dernier chiffre. Mais de quoi s’agit-il ?

Strong measures by Europe could quickly deprive Russia of oil and gas income worth billions, experts say

The frightful noise of gunfire, bombing and children’s screams in the cities of Ukraine reverberates across Europe. The full-scale Russian invasion launched last week is an unprovoked, heinous crime perpetrated against Ukraine’s citizens, their sovereign democratic state and all the free peoples of the world. The 24th of February is a day that will live in infamy. It will not be forgiven. It will surely never be forgotten.

On 28 February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body solely dedicated to looking at the science behind climate change, will release a major report on the impacts of the climate crisis and why it is imperative that we act now to address the growing risks. The report, which focuses on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, is expected to detail how climate impacts are already wreaking havoc in every part of the world and how, without much bolder action, more lives will be lost and more livelihoods destroyed. The report will look at challenges and solutions for addressing these risks and minimizing vulnerability unique to the world’s regions, cities and other habitats.

Als honderd mensen van thuis uit werken kunnen ze elk uur 4 liter autobrandstof uitsparen en tot 7,4 kilogram minder CO2 uitstoten. In de smart cities van de toekomst wordt telewerken dus wellicht het nieuwe normaal.