Showing posts by Elizabeth Hipple.
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Going Back to Cali–or Chennai: Cities Should Plan For “Climate Migration”
›August 6, 2009 // By Elizabeth Hipple
On Monday, California became the first U.S. state to issue a report outlining strategies for adapting to climate change. Among other recommendations, it suggests that Californians should consider moving.
The report encourages California’s government agencies to consider “incentive programs to encourage property owners in high-risk areas to relocate,” and “avoid significant new development in areas prone to flooding, sea-level rise, temperature changes, and precipitation changes.” It points out that more than half ($2.5 trillion) of the total value of Californian real estate assets is at risk.
While California has been at the forefront of state governments in mitigation, the report notes that “adaptation is a relatively new concept in California climate policy.”
Other parts of the American West may also need to consider such adaptation strategies. Research recently released by scientists at the University of Colorado predicts that all of the reservoirs along the Colorado River could by dry by 2057 due to overuse and global warming. David Little, director of planning for Denver Water, told The Salt Lake Tribune that while he did not think that Denver’s water supplies would be affected, Denver could see an influx of people from California, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico, who “are going to tend to migrate to places where they have water.”
Searching for Shelter in the Megacities of Africa, Asia
The consequences of climate change for the homes of people in the developing world are already much more dire than for Americans. A recent CARE International report, “In Search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement” has brought attention to the 200 to 700 million people expected to be forced from their homes by 2050 due to climatic changes.
Urbanization has already led to the growth of “megacities” in the developing world with populations in the millions. If climate change forces millions of people to leave homes threatened by rising sea levels and desertification, “most migrants will move within their own country or region and, following an already well-trod pattern of rural-to-urban migration, many of them will head to cities,” writes the Climate Matters blog.
According to a study cited by the report, in West Africa between 1960 and 2000 “rainfall decreases, land degradation, and violence in the arid and semi-arid areas of Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger resulted in a rapid intra-country migration southward and a swelling of big cities like Dakar, Bamako, Ouagadougou, Niamey and Kano.”
A Financial Times story about the town of Nandom, Ghana, illustrates some of these trends. A 2004 survey of the city’s residents revealed that all of the family members who left Nandom moved to the more prosperous southern region of Ghana and its cities, including the capital city of Accra In Africa in general, the UN City Initiatives estimates that “about one in three slum dwellers can be considered as an environmental refugee, driven off the land by advancing desert frontiers and failing farming systems.”
While some will be fleeing the countryside for cities, others will be fleeing one city for another. According to data from CIESIN, more than 125 million people live within areas of India and Bangladesh that are vulnerable to a 10 meter rise in sea level. Sudhir Chella Rajan of the Indian Institute of Technology believes that residents of major Indian coastal cities such as Mumbai, Kolkota, and Chennai will be forced to move to large interior cities. “This would mean that already burdened cities such as Delhi, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Pune, and Hyderabad, which will have serious resource constraints of their own by the middle of the century, will have to be prepared to accommodate enormous numbers of migrants from the coasts,” Rajan says in “Blue Alert: Climate Migrants in South Asia.“
If such predictions are true, and millions of people will be moving to and from cities ill-equipped to handle the disruption, more cities and states need to develop adaptation plans like California’s. They certainly wouldn’t want to emulate the bad example set during the Great Depression, when an LAPD “bum blockade” turned away farmers fleeing the Dust Bowl. (Instructively, geographer Robert McLeman tells Slate that the most mobile “climate migrants” during this era were members of the working middle class, not the rich or the poor).
While mitigating climate change is and should continue to be a critical part of all plans to address the issue, cities in particular must begin to plan how they are going to absorb the influx of new residents as climate change hastens urbanization.
By Comparative Urban Studies Project intern Elizabeth Hipple and edited by Meaghan Parker -
Summer in the City: Water Supplies Fall and Tempers Flare in South Asia
›July 22, 2009 // By Elizabeth HippleThree people died in the city of Bhopal, in north-central India, in a battle between neighbors for scarce water, The Guardian reported this past week.
Fights regularly broke out when the water tankers that serve 100,000 of the city’s residents make their deliveries.
The monsoon this year produced less rain than usual, exacerbating a drought. In addition, the number of people in Bhopal’s slums is growing. “The population has increased, but the water supply is the same,” a local committee chairman told The Guardian.
The northern parts of India were hardest hit, but much of India experienced similar conditions, including the city of Mumbai. Officials there cut water supplies for the city by 30 percent when the levels of the five lakes that serve as Mumbai’s primary sources of water dropped dangerously low.
But while heavy rains in the last few days mostly restored supplies, they also shut down the waterlogged city, reviving fears of 2005’s deadly floods. According to a new book and exhibit by University of Pennsylvania architects, the sprawling city has paved over the mangrove wetlands that protect it from flooding.
Pollution, climate change, population growth, urbanization, and industrialization in the world’s developing countries continue to increase demand for its finite water supplies. Today, 700 million people live in countries experiencing water scarcity or stress; by 2035, that figure is expected to have reached 3 billion people, or almost half of the world’s population. Asia, with 60% of the world’s population but only 36% of the world’s freshwater, will be particularly hard hit.
The problems vary across South Asia. The rivers around Dhaka, Bangladesh, are so polluted from industrial dumping that specialists are saying the situation is beyond repair. Lack of access to clean water and knowledge about hygienic sanitation practices leads to thousands of preventable deaths from diarrhea every year in Nepal. In Karachi, Pakistan, stealing public water out of pipes and tankers is a $500 million industry, “a mark of the state’s decreasing capacity to provide for its own,” reports Bill Wheeler in a special report in GOOD magazine.
The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 between India and Pakistan has long been hailed as an example of the cooperation that can result from the necessity of sharing such an essential resource across borders. But with climate change causing the Himalayan glaciers that feed the Indus River to melt at a faster pace, some experts warn that balancing the water needs of both countries across their contested border could be a trigger point for conflict—particularly for two nations that cannot provide many of their citizens with access to safe drinking water under normal circumstances.
South Asian governments will be called upon more and more to balance the water of needs between different users at the local level and work with other governments to share and conserve water at the international level. But as Ashok Jaitly of New Delhi’s Energy and Resources Institute told Wheeler, both India and Pakistan share a “mentality that obscures the need to manage demand with conservation, water tariffs, and an end to destructive but politically popular practices in both countries.”
Despite the recognition of water as a growing security issue by the international community, it is difficult to improve what is a symptom of deeper-set problems. But they must try, if only for their own security. As Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari warned in a Washington Post op-ed, “The water crisis in Pakistan is directly linked to relations with India. Resolution could prevent an environmental catastrophe in South Asia, but failure to do so could fuel the fires of discontent that lead to extremism and terrorism.”
By Comparative Urban Studies Project intern Elizabeth Hipple and edited by Meaghan Parker
Photo: The Ganges River in Varanasi, India. Courtesy flickr user Denver Pam
