We read Nicholas Stern’s blog post, “Low-Carbon Growth: The Only Sustainable Way to Overcome World Poverty,” with appreciation and enthusiasm. It is an insightful and important essay, illuminating the bedrock recognition on which effective 21st century development efforts must build: global climate change and poverty are inextricably interconnected. The best way to break one is to bend the other.
Yet there is another dimension to this challenge: the dangers of global poverty and climate crises will be especially acute in cities because accelerating, unplanned urbanization around the world tends to concentrate low-income people in high risk areas, on ecologically fragile land, desperately vulnerable to the consequences of imminent and worsening climate disruption.
The reason is clear: more people live in cities than ever before. In 1950, the earth’s total population was 2.2 billion and New York was the only metropolis with a population greater than 10 million.
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