City Vs Country: the Concrete Jungle Is Greener

City vs country: The concrete jungle is greener  Updated 12:19 18 November 2010 by Shanta Barley  Magazine issue 2785.

They may not have so many trees to hug, but city slickers lead more environmentally friendly lives than their country cousins ON THE Ordos plateau in north central China, shepherds can remember the grass being tall enough to hide a horse. No longer. It is now so short and sparse that in places even a scurrying rabbit has no cover. To try and halt this loss of habitat, the government has paid farmers and shepherds to move to the district capital, Ordos City. Some 435,000 of the region's inhabitants - almost half the total - have left as a result. "What the Chinese government has realised is that these people will do less environmental damage living at high density in a city than when they're spread out across the countryside," says Gordon McGranahan, an urban economist at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in London who visited Ordos last year. The idea is rapidly gaining weight outside of China, with a wave of recent research showing that cities may provide the perfect environment to deal with impending environmental crises. Some even claim that cities are the best way to reduce poverty and stem population growth. Recasting cities as green utopias is somewhat counter-intuitive. The old stereotype has cities as the environmental villains: dirty and smog-filled, producing huge amounts of air pollution and waste. It is a picture reinforced by bodies like the US-based Clinton Climate Initiative, who claim that 80 per cent of the world's human-produced greenhouse gas emissions come from cities. Yet the figure does not stand scrutiny. "I knew it couldn't be true, as deforestation and other land use accounts for 30 per cent," says David Satterthwaite, who studies poverty reduction and adaptation to climate change at the IIED. Indeed, there are many reasons to expect that cities might actually reduce each individual's carbon footprint, all of which hinge around the fact that cities concentrate people close together rather than spreading them thinly across the landscape. Recent reports by the United Nations suggest that, by 2008, 50 per cent of the world's population lived in urban settlements, which together take up just 3 per cent of the Earth's land area. This mass exodus from the countryside should lift the strain of intensive agriculture from the land, allowing forests to bounce back. What's more, the high concentration of houses and businesses in cities means it is easier for local authorities to run an energy efficient infrastructure for sanitation, running water and electricity. "Putting a decent sewer down the middle [of a street] and connecting everyone is actually very cheap and doable compared to if they lived far away from each other," says Satterthwaite. Urbanisation also cuts down car use: people in the cities do not usually need to travel as far each day as country dwellers, and are more likely to be able to take buses and trains for the journeys they do make. "The denser the city, the less people drive," says Jeff Kenworthy, who studies sustainable transport at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. Bearing these factors in mind, Satterthwaite decided to re-examine the estimates of urban and rural carbon footprints. In 2008, he published a study showing that cities produce just 30 to 40 per cent of emissions - nowhere near as high as previously thought ( Environment and Urbanization , vol 20, p 539). In the same year, the Brookings Institution in Washington DC reported that the average US city dweller's carbon footprint is 14 per cent smaller than the average for country and city dwellers combined. Hot on its heels in 2009, David Dodman from the IIED published a study that examined the carbon footprint of individual cities around the world. The average Londoner, the report found, produces around half the emissions of the average Briton, while each New Yorker produces just 30 per cent of the emissions of the average US resident. Citizens of São Paolo, Brazil, are responsible for just 18 per cent of the average for their country ( Environment and Urbanization , vol 21, p 185). The average New Yorker produces just 30 per cent of the greenhouse emissions of the average US citizen These figures may need some qualification before we arrive at a firm figure for the environmental benefits of city living. Over time, urbanisation can drive an economy and increase the wealth of a country's inhabitants. Since richer people tend to consume more energy, this could offset some of the benefits of the increased efficiency of city living. Yet it is important to remember that cities can also provide the ideal launch pad for future green initiatives. Seattle, for example, has already begun to siphon off the methane produced by decomposing garbage to use for fuel. Such schemes would not be possible if the same population were spread more thinly in farms and villages. "You need to hit a certain scale of waste generation for that sort of methane capture to be efficient and economical," says David Lee, who studies waste disposal at the Senseable City Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cities also offer a more skilled workforce that helps make such innovative schemes possible, Lee says. The size of each individual's carbon footprint is, of course, only one part of the impending environmental crisis. Equally important is the increasing number of people in the world. Each year, about 130 million babies are born, most of whom will grow up producing their own carbon emissions, and require water and land to sustain them.

Urban families It looks like urbanisation may help to defuse this ticking time bomb, too. On average, women in the cities have fewer children than their rural counterparts - partly because children just aren't as useful to families in the city, according to Douglas Massey at Princeton University. On farms, children are a source of cheap labour. But in cities they are expected to go to school rather than work, so parents cannot support a larger family. Urban women also have better access to family planning and birth control, and often have better employment opportunities. "Women in cities stay in school longer, have better access to contraceptives, get married later and have their first child later," says Jocelyn Finlay at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. These habits of urban living may persist even when people go back to the countryside. A recent survey of 3000 Chinese women who had returned to their villages from the cities found that they were more likely to use contraception and to want fewer children than those who had never left the villages. What's more, their presence made it more likely that their neighbours would make similar choices ( Studies in Family Planning , vol 41, p 31). But do these benefits come at a high price for the people who have migrated to the cities? Crime rates are higher in cities than in the countryside, and the air pollution is undoubtedly unhealthy. That's not to mention the poor quality of life in slums, which, as Stewart Brand wrote in his 2009 book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, "typically look like human cesspools and often smell like them". Despite looking like human cesspools, slums may well be the best place to tackle poverty head on Yet despite these reservations, Brand believes that slums may well be the best way to tackle poverty head on - provided that governments act to ensure the inhabitants have a reasonable standard of living. For one thing, cities offer better jobs that help people to pull themselves out of the poverty trap, and the high concentration of people makes it quicker and cheaper for governments to roll out services like education, sanitation and electricity to more people. For this reason, a 2003 UN report concluded that "the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city". Satterthwaite has seen first hand evidence of this. He works with women's savings groups - de facto banks that allow poor women to save a daily pittance - in 22 countries. "These 'banks' exist in villages but it's in the city that they talk to each other, form federations, and grow muscle," he says. Some members even buy land together. "Cities are where social reform has always taken place, and that's not going to change," he adds. All of these benefits are evident in Ordos. Many of the farmers and shepherds who left behind their crops and flocks to take jobs as security men and waiters in Ordos City are five times better off than they were. As for the environmental changes, early reports suggest that the long grass is slowly returning to the abandoned fields - perhaps not enough to rival its glory days, but a sure sign that the desert is finally retreating. When this article was first posted, it incorrectly stated that "Each year, 75 million babies are born". That is the increase in population; the number of babies born is around 130 million. Shanta Barley is a freelance writer based in London

 From issue 2785 of New Scientist magazine, page 32-35.