All About: Cities and energy consumption

Humans can now officially be called an urban species. More than half of the global population now live in cities and the United Nations says that by 2030, 60 percent of us will live in them.

Yet according to U.N. Habitat, the world’s cities emit almost 80 percent of global carbon dioxide as well as “significant amounts of other greenhouse gases.”
Put simply, if you want to tackle climate change, tackle the cities.

The UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research recently went as far as saying that “the fate of the Earth’s climate is intrinsically linked to how our cities develop over the coming decades.”

Two centuries ago there was only one city on the planet that could say it had a million inhabitants — that was London.

Today more than 400 cities can boast that (408 to be precise, according to the Earth Policy Institute).

But today a population of 1 million people means nothing; we are moving into the era of megacities of 10 million-plus people.

Today, there are 20 so-called megacities, whose populations — and therefore energy needs — easily exceed that of countries, according to Earth Policy Institute (more people now live in Tokyo than Canada, for example).

Naturally, these cities are — and will continue to be — resource-hungry.

Despite only representing 2 percent of the world’s surface area, they are responsible for 75 percent of the world’s energy consumption. London, for example, requires a staggering 125 times its own area in resources to sustain itself, according to the New Scientist.

CNN