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Category: Urban
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Life at 115F: a sweltering summer pushes Las Vegas to the brink. Record heat is killing hundreds in Clark county. But one of America’s fastest-growing metro areas just keeps getting bigger. Guardian  Gabrielle Canon 25 July 2024 Hot air wafted through the heavy, gold-lined doors of a Las Vegas casino as they opened, offering a reminder of a disaster quietly unfolding outside. Even though the sun had just set on an evening in mid-July, temperatures were yet to dip below 100F (37C). Spawned from a paved-over oasis in the Mojave, this desert metropolis has always been hot. But a string of brutal heatwaves this summer has pushed Sin City to a deadly summer. It’s hard to tell from inside the cool, cavernous buildings that line the Las Vegas Strip, which have become unwitting refuges from the summer elements. Tourists willing to enter labyrinths of slot machines and blaring pop music, shops and shows can spend hours lost in an alternate world, away from the sun. For the 2.3 million people who call this valley home, the dangerous elements are harder to ignore. When temperatures climb, shadeless streets are hot enough to cause second-degree burns in seconds. This June was the city’s hottest on record. In July, things got even worse: the city experienced a record seven days at 115F or higher and set a new all-time high of 120F.

The heat is just a signal of what’s to come. Temperatures in Las Vegasare rising faster than almost anywhere else in the US. To accommodate them, the county has thrown its support behind a federal bill that would open up 25,000 acres of the surrounding desert for housing and commercial development. The county also has plans for a new airport, slated for completion in 2037, that would pave over thousands more acres of arid landscape near the California border. New shopping centers and cul de sacs all mean more concrete – and more heat – in an area where the ability to afford or access air conditioning can already mean the difference between life and death. Even after she spent most of the day inside, the heat still shocked Inata, a woman who traveled with her friends Chastity and Belinda from Massachusetts to vacation in the city last week. “It was horrendous,” she said. “In Massachusetts, if there was weather like this, there would be ambulances around.” The three women said they struggled to cool down at the pool because the warm water offered little relief and the surrounding pavement burned their feet. “I don’t know how Las Vegas people do it but kudos to them,” she added. “I couldn’t do this every day.”

A daily battle for survival.....The record heat is pushing residents to their limits – and has perhaps been most sinister for the more than 5,000 people in the county estimated to be experiencing homelessness.  Some have opted to seek refuge in underground tunnels during the summer, risking the waters that surge through them during summer monsoons over exposure to the brutal heat.  There was the woman whose leg was amputated after she got third-degree burns from passing out on the scalding hot sidewalk. She now uses a wheelchair. Just last week,  aid workers rushed to revive another woman, age 81, who passed out in an encampment. They found her surrounded by her pet dogs, who had all died in the heat. He was relieved they were able to save her. That’s not always how the story ends.....read on. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jul/25/las-vegas-extreme-heat   And as Climate Change and Global Heating worsen, it is hardly even mentioned by the average citizen- and in spite of all that, they elected Trump....insane! 

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Category: Urban
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The Paris Agreement. Many cities’ emissions, particularly those of higher income and high emitting cities, need to do the same. This report presents research on C40 member cities’ emissions and finds that, at the time of publishing, at least 27 member cities’ emissions had already peaked. c40 Knowledge Hub 2020 To be counted as having peaked in this analysis cities must have reached their maximum level of emissions at least five years before the most recent inventory year (i.e. by 2012), among other criteria. More cities may have reached their maximum emissions level since, but won’t yet meet the five-year requirement.

The cities identified in this analysis as having peaked their emissions are.......Barcelona, Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Copenhagen, Heidelberg, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Melbourne, Milan, Montréal, New Orleans, New York City, Oslo, Paris, Philadelphia, Portland, Rome, San Francisco, Stockholm, Sydney, Toronto, Vancouver, Warsaw and Washington D.C. Five of these cities – Berlin, Heidelberg, Los Angeles, Montréal and Stockholm – peaked their emissions as early as 1990. There are very likely to be others outside of the C40 network. The research used data from greenhouse gas emission inventories based on the Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories (GPC), as well as data from other sources where necessary. The report deep dives on six cities to look at what is driving their emissions reductions......

  • Copenhagen has focused on decentralised energy. The city has more than halved its emissions since peaking in 1991. A key contributing factor is the expansion of its district heating system, one of the largest in the world, which has been gradually shifted to renewable energy sources.
  • San Francisco has been decarbonising its grid. Emissions have been declining since 2000 mainly thanks to reduced energy demand from buildings, and a shift to cleaner electricity sources. The city has closed two fossil fuel power plants and pushed for renewables, with 77% of electricity supplied from greenhouse gas-free sources, covering all city-owned buildings.
  • Tokyo has reduced building energy consumption. Tokyo’s city’s energy consumption has steadily declined since the early 2000s, but the carbon intensity of its grid electricity has increased by nearly 50% as large nuclear power plants have been closed and replaced with natural gas. With limited control over this, Tokyo accelerated energy efficiency policies and introduced the world’s first city level cap-and-trade carbon emissions scheme, mandating emissions reductions for large buildings.
  • Paris has enhanced its mobility networks. Since peaking in 2004, Paris has been promoting clean and active mobility, making significant improvements to public transport and cycling facilities. A programme to remove diesel-powered commercial vehicles is under way.
  • Sydney is optimising energy use in buildings, which account for over 80% of its emissions. The city’s ‘Better Buildings Partnership’ has reduced emissions by 52% with energy efficiency measures, a cleaner grid and building-scale solar energy.
  • Vancouver has been improving its waste management. Despite a growing population, between 2007 and 2016 Vancouver reduced the amount of waste sent to landfill by 23%, more than doubled the amount of waste composted, and increased the efficiency of its landfill gas collection system.....                                                     
  • Read more in the article https://www.c40knowledgehub.org/s/article/27-C40-Cities-have-peaked-their-greenhouse-gas-emissions?language=en_US

Mapped: Cities with a climate action plan..... https://www.c40knowledgehub.org/s/article/Mapped-Cities-with-a-climate-action-plan?language=en_US

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Category: Urban
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Growing to Its Potential,The Value of Urban Nature for Communities, Investors, and the Climate RMI   Julia Meisel, Mia Reback, Michael Donatti, Zach Clayton, Emma Loewen, Lindsay Rasmussen, Jacob Korn, Rushad Nanavatty REPORT 2022
Global Challenges are pushing cities to their breaking point. With cities expected to house 68 percent of the world’s population by 2050, warming twice as fast as the global average, and disproportionately affected by extreme weather, we need to use every tool at our disposal to ensure a low-carbon, livable, resilient, and equitable urban future. One frequently overlooked tool with great potential is urban nature — cities’ forests, parks, street trees, green stormwater infrastructure, and bodies of water. Many benefits of nature are well known, like recreation, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration. But urban nature delivers countless additional benefits for cities including lower energy use and emissions, jobs, community connectedness, pollution mitigation, and heat mitigation. In economic terms, these benefits add up. This new report quantifies the overall value of nature’s benefits in cities and — for the first time — specifically quantifies urban nature’s potential to reduce energy consumption and emissions at the city level.Our report finds that globally, the value of urban nature’s benefits is nine times the costs, delivering tremendous value for cities, communities, and investors.The report shares novel quantified estimates of urban nature’s energy, carbon, and cost savings potential for buildings, stormwater management, and transportation in six cities around the world Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire; Ahmedabad, India; Austin, Texas, USA; Curitiba, Brazil; Houston, Texas, USA; and Sacramento, California, USA. For example........
  • Building-adjacent trees, overall city tree canopy, and green roofs can reduce building energy use and peak demand associated with mechanical cooling, saving Sacramento over $150 million in investment in new power generation.
  • Distributed green stormwater features like rain gardens, grassy parks, and natural lakes could help avoid up to 87 percent of the embodied carbon of grey infrastructure, like large concrete basins and tanks, in cities like Ahmedabad, India.
  • Street trees could reduce a city’s annual vehicle kilometers traveled equivalent to taking 4,200 cars off the road in 2050 in a city like Austin, leading to $1.5 billion in health benefits.

Despite this immense value, few cities are optimizing their use of nature, especially as a climate and resilience solution. By 2050, the annual global net benefits of urban nature could be $3.1 trillion per year. But the world will need to triple its current level of investment in urban nature to achieve this result. This report arms local policymakers and investors with the information they need to make the case for urgently scaling up investment in urban nature.Momentum is growing to address the urgent challenges of climate change, ecosystem degradation, and rapid urbanization. With cities expected to house 68% of the world’s population by 2050, warming twice as fast as the global average, and disproportionately affected by storms, droughts, and coastal flooding, we need to use every tool at our disposal to ensure a low-carbon, livable, resilient, and equitable urban future.  One frequently overlooked tool with great potential is urban nature — cities’ forests, parks, street trees, green stormwater infrastructure, and bodies of water. The benefits urban nature provides include jobs, higher property values, improved physical and mental health, pollution mitigation, heat mitigation, lower energy bills, safer streets, flood protection, biodiversity, and community connectedness. Strategic and systematic investment in urban nature can unleash these benefits to help cities meet climate, quality-of-life, resilience, and equity goals. But the economic value of these benefits is not always well quantified, and potential funders struggle to build a business case for investments in urban nature. Local governments have to bear most of the costs of providing and maintaining these resources, while property owners, businesses, insurers, and the general public enjoy the benefits. It doesn’t have to be this way. Urban nature is not merely a cost to bear but an enormous investment opportunity. Its many benefits have substantial economic value that outweighs its cost at the city scale, globally, and over time — but we will only realize those benefits with investment. Our analysis found the following- Spending $7 trillion on urban nature globally could create $59 trillion in net benefits between 2023 and 2050 — a benefit-cost ratio of nine-to-one.  By 2050, annual net benefits could be $3.1 trillion per year. • Annual investment in urban nature needs to increase on average to $98 billion, or three times current levels, to achieve these results. (For comparison, this is around how much the European Union spent on renewable energy subsidies in 2019.   

The report highlights the significant benefits of incorporating more nature into urban areas, demonstrating how it can positively impact communities, investors, and the climate by reducing energy consumption, improving air quality, mitigating heat waves, and providing stormwater management solutions. Key points about the report:

  • Economic benefits:
    The report argues that investing in urban nature can generate substantial economic returns, with potential cost savings on energy, infrastructure, and healthcare due to improved health and well-being associated with greener cities. 
  • Climate change mitigation:
    Urban nature can play a crucial role in mitigating climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions through carbon sequestration and helping cities adapt to the impacts of climate change, such as heat waves. 
  • Community impact:
    Increased access to green spaces can improve residents' mental and physical health, enhance social connection, and create safer neighborhoods. 
  • Specific examples:
    The report includes case studies of cities like Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, and Sacramento, California, demonstrating how they can leverage urban nature to address their unique challenges.   https://rmi.org/insight/growing-to-its-potential/
  • Read the Report.....chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2022/11/urban_nature_methodology.pdf

  https://unu.edu/article/development-aid-cuts-will-hit-fragile-countries-hard-could-fuel-violent-conflict

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Category: Urban
Hits: 94
Growing to Its Potential,The Value of Urban Nature for Communities, Investors, and the Climate RMI   Julia Meisel, Mia Reback, Michael Donatti, Zach Clayton, Emma Loewen, Lindsay Rasmussen, Jacob Korn, Rushad Nanavatty REPORT 2022
Global Challenges are pushing cities to their breaking point. With cities expected to house 68 percent of the world’s population by 2050, warming twice as fast as the global average, and disproportionately affected by extreme weather, we need to use every tool at our disposal to ensure a low-carbon, livable, resilient, and equitable urban future. One frequently overlooked tool with great potential is urban nature — cities’ forests, parks, street trees, green stormwater infrastructure, and bodies of water. Many benefits of nature are well known, like recreation, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration. But urban nature delivers countless additional benefits for cities including lower energy use and emissions, jobs, community connectedness, pollution mitigation, and heat mitigation. In economic terms, these benefits add up. This new report quantifies the overall value of nature’s benefits in cities and — for the first time — specifically quantifies urban nature’s potential to reduce energy consumption and emissions at the city level.

Our report finds that globally, the value of urban nature’s benefits is nine times the costs, delivering tremendous value for cities, communities, and investors.The report shares novel quantified estimates of urban nature’s energy, carbon, and cost savings potential for buildings, stormwater management, and transportation in six cities around the world Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire; Ahmedabad, India; Austin, Texas, USA; Curitiba, Brazil; Houston, Texas, USA; and Sacramento, California, USA. For example........

  • Building-adjacent trees, overall city tree canopy, and green roofs can reduce building energy use and peak demand associated with mechanical cooling, saving Sacramento over $150 million in investment in new power generation.
  • Distributed green stormwater features like rain gardens, grassy parks, and natural lakes could help avoid up to 87 percent of the embodied carbon of grey infrastructure, like large concrete basins and tanks, in cities like Ahmedabad, India.
  • Street trees could reduce a city’s annual vehicle kilometers traveled equivalent to taking 4,200 cars off the road in 2050 in a city like Austin, leading to $1.5 billion in health benefits.

Despite this immense value, few cities are optimizing their use of nature, especially as a climate and resilience solution. By 2050, the annual global net benefits of urban nature could be $3.1 trillion per year. But the world will need to triple its current level of investment in urban nature to achieve this result. This report arms local policymakers and investors with the information they need to make the case for urgently scaling up investment in urban nature.

 Momentum is growing to address the urgent challenges of climate change, ecosystem degradation, and rapid urbanization. With cities expected to house 68% of the world’s population by 2050, warming twice as fast as the global average, and disproportionately affected by storms, droughts, and coastal flooding, we need to use every tool at our disposal to ensure a low-carbon, livable, resilient, and equitable urban future.  One frequently overlooked tool with great potential is urban nature — cities’ forests, parks, street trees, green stormwater infrastructure, and bodies of water. The benefits urban nature provides include jobs, higher property values, improved physical and mental health, pollution mitigation, heat mitigation, lower energy bills, safer streets, flood protection, biodiversity, and community connectedness. Strategic and systematic investment in urban nature can unleash these benefits to help cities meet climate, quality-of-life, resilience, and equity goals. But the economic value of these benefits is not always well quantified, and potential funders struggle to build a business case for investments in urban nature. Local governments have to bear most of the costs of providing and maintaining these resources, while property owners, businesses, insurers, and the general public enjoy the benefits. It doesn’t have to be this way. Urban nature is not merely a cost to bear but an enormous investment opportunity. Its many benefits have substantial economic value that outweighs its cost at the city scale, globally, and over time — but we will only realize those benefits with investment. Our analysis found the following- Spending $7 trillion on urban nature globally could create $59 trillion in net benefits between 2023 and 2050 — a benefit-cost ratio of nine-to-one.  By 2050, annual net benefits could be $3.1 trillion per year. • Annual investment in urban nature needs to increase on average to $98 billion, or three times current levels, to achieve these results. (For comparison, this is around how much the European Union spent on renewable energy subsidies in 2019.   The report highlights the significant benefits of incorporating more nature into urban areas, demonstrating how it can positively impact communities, investors, and the climate by reducing energy consumption, improving air quality, mitigating heat waves, and providing stormwater management solutions. Key points about the report:

  • Economic benefits:
    The report argues that investing in urban nature can generate substantial economic returns, with potential cost savings on energy, infrastructure, and healthcare due to improved health and well-being associated with greener cities. 
  • Climate change mitigation:
    Urban nature can play a crucial role in mitigating climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions through carbon sequestration and helping cities adapt to the impacts of climate change, such as heat waves. 
  • Community impact:
    Increased access to green spaces can improve residents' mental and physical health, enhance social connection, and create safer neighborhoods. 
  • Specific examples:
    The report includes case studies of cities like Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, and Sacramento, California, demonstrating how they can leverage urban nature to address their unique challenges.   https://rmi.org/insight/growing-to-its-potential/
  • Read the Report.....chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2022/11/urban_nature_methodology.pdf

Details
Category: Urban
Hits: 83

28 big American cities are sinking, Subsidence threatens 34 million Americans–from Denver to DC. Popular Science Laura Baisas May 8, 2025 It’s not unknown that some major urban areas in the United States are sinking. And the problem could be even more widespread. A new analysis of the 28 most populated cities in the country found that all of them are sinking by roughly two to 10 millimeters (about 0.07 to 0.39 inches) per year. The major cause? Groundwater extraction as the demand for freshwater grows. The findings are detailed in a study published May 8 in the journal Nature Cities.

 
Small measurements, big impacts......While land sinking less than an inch per year might not seem like much on paper, small shifts in land can have big effects. Land shifts downward can impact the structural integrity of buildings, roads, bridges, and dams. A 2024 study found that regions of the Atlantic coast to be sinking by as much as five millimeters per year.This new study used satellite-based radar measurements to create high-res maps of subsidence–or sinking land– in these areas. They looked at the subsidence for the 28 most populated cities in the US–including New York, Dallas, and Seattle–which are home to 34 million people or roughly 12 percent of the US population.  “What makes this work especially powerful is the use of satellite radar (InSAR) to map subsidence in incredible detail,” study co-author and Virginia Tech geodesist/geophysicist Manoochehr Shirzaei tells Popular Science. “Think of it like getting a CAT scan of the Earth’s surface—except from space. This technology helps city planners and engineers pinpoint exactly where the ground is moving, which is essential for proactive maintenance, zoning, and flood risk planning.” In all of the cities studied, at least 20 percent of the urban area is sinking. In 25 out of the 28, at least 65 percent is sinking. New York, Chicago, Seattle, Denver, Columbus, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston are sinking at roughly two millimeters per year. Additionally, several cities in Texas showed some of the highest measured rates of subsidence at about 5 millimeters per year. Certain parts of Houston are seeing as much as 10 millimeters per year, according to the study.  “A lot of small changes will build up over time, magnifying weak spots within urban systems and heightening flood risks,” Leonard Ohenhen, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, said in a statement. This evidence from Houston shows some differences in sinking rates between localized zones and areas right next door. This shows one of the more harmful and somewhat invisible effects of subsidence. With something like flood hazards, the risks are visible only when the land sinks below a specific threshold. However, inconsistent land motion–like what researchers observed in Houston–can crack and destabilize buildings, foundations, and infrastructure.
Signs of sinking......When the team assessed how infrastructure risks increase when subsidence rates vary, they found that New York, Las Vegas, and Washington, DC. also had high rates of variance. The slow nature also means that its infrastructure quality can be quietly compromised over time, according to Shirzaei. “Several telltale signs of land subsidence are visible to the naked eye and may indicate early stages of ground sinking or differential settlement,” he says. “In urban areas, these signs often appear gradually but can become serious if left unaddressed, especially in cities built on soft soils or where groundwater is heavily extracted.”Shirzaei says that some of these telltale signs include.....read on   https://www.popsci.com/environment/sinking-american-cities/?utm_term=pscene050925&utm_campaign=PopSci_Actives_Newsletter&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email      AND THERE'S MORE...... NYC is sinking and climate change is only making it worse

More Articles …

  1. CIties tightly Locked into global Flows of Capital and People – Immigration has become the Largest Component of Population Growth, and thus a Major Determinant of Housing Markets.
  2. Sustainable Public Spaces: The Role of Landscape Architecture In Urban Resilience.
  3. Integrating Urban Nature into Cities Reduces Emissions, Saves money, and Promotes Equity.
  4. Urban Rewilding and why it’s a Win-Win-Win!

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