Posts tagged with 'resilience'
The COVID-19 pandemic is already affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, and it’s poised to get worse before it gets better. Our primary concern is for the health and welfare of all those affected. The COVID-19 outbreak’s ...
The COVID-19 pandemic is laying bare two unavoidable facts about our new reality: we are more interconnected than ever, and cities are at the frontlines of this crisis and will be at the frontlines of any similarly globalized crisis in ...
“Acknowledgement, voice and the right to negotiate” – that’s what’s needed to bring the world’s urban poor back into the system and begin creating cities that work for everyone, said Sheela Patel, chair of Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI), at the 10th ...
As thousands of urban leaders gather in Abu Dhabi for the World Urban Forum, the impacts of the climate crisis on cities have become more visible than ever. Severe floods tore through Jakarta last month. Heatwaves scorched cities from India to Europe last year. ...
Climate actions have often fallen into one of two strategies: mitigation efforts to lower or remove greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere, and adaptation efforts to adjust systems and societies to withstand the impacts of climate change. The separation has led to ...
In Pasig City, Philippines, southeast of Manila, there’s an apartment complex with whitewashed walls and colorful trim. It’s an unassuming set of buildings, but a globally important one. The Manggahan Low Rise Building Project is a climate-resilient building, meant to ...
Chile withdrew as host of this year’s UN climate conference amid widespread unrest, but that doesn’t mean that fighting climate change should be pushed into second place behind addressing social inequality. On the contrary, the situation in Chile shows all countries that the social and climate ...
India is ground zero for extreme heat. More than 6,100 people have died from heat events since 2010. Half of the country reeled under severe heat waves this summer, when temperatures reached over 48 degrees Celsius (118 degrees Fahrenheit) in many places. The urban ...
Monsoon season has always brought torrential downpours to Gorakhpur, India, but the city has seen record-breaking rainfall in the last few years. Residents of the northern Indian city often find their streets submerged in water, their houses waterlogged. Stagnant floodwaters ...
The UN Climate Action Summit in New York this week saw strengthened national climate commitments from 67 countries, but a disappointing showing from the world’s major economies. As national governments fall short, cities must continue to be climate champions. Indeed, ...
World leaders will soon gather in New York City for a summit on an urgent challenge that affects every aspect of our lives, from the economy to jobs, security and migration and our health. It is, of course, the climate crisis. The tens of thousands of fires recently afflicting the ...
Big ideas can forever alter the fate of cities when they are written into cement, steel and stone. When St. Petersburg, Russia, was created in 1703 by Peter the Great, he envisioned the new capital as an emblem of a modern ...
A city without buildings is simply not a city. And yet when it comes to climate action, buildings tend to take a back seat to transport, energy production and industry. Making buildings more energy-efficient is the cheapest way to reduce ...
“Poor and vulnerable” is a common refrain in climate change stories. It’s a phrase used with good reason, to highlight how climate change disproportionately affects the disenfranchised. Economically, politically and socially vulnerable communities feel climate impacts first and hardest. They have fewer ...
When Rani, a mother of five in Khulna, Bangladesh, found that the tea stall outside her home kept flooding, she didn’t wait for a government climate resilience program to swoop in. Like many people in urban communities facing the effects ...
