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The scale of risk from climate change is arguably of a greater and different magnitude than that the financial crisis. Equally big are the consequences of ignoring or mismanaging it, which may be irreversible and may inflict damage on generations to come. Indeed, climate change is of a civilizational, if not planetary character, whereas the financial crisis is more of a technocratic nature.
Hence China’s call for working towards an ecological civilization, which like any civilization has an innate ability to dialogue –peacefully- with other civilizations. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has made an energy-saving, environmental-friendly society a mandate in its Charter. The objective of such a civilization is to ensure that human and nature are in harmony, development and the environment form a win-win interrelationship, and the economic and social development achievements are shared among all social members.
In the quest for a green economy, the prefix eco- is being appended to virtually every conceivable activity and initiative: eco-innovation, eco-transport, eco-architecture, eco-jobs, eco-farming, eco-living - and of course, eco-city and in future maybe eco-regions, akin to the special economic zones, to build low carbon economic areas.
The practice of the eco-city approach is a relatively recent phenomenon in urban planning and design – while the theory and thinking about eco-city and eco-system programming dates back to the early 1970s. UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Programme (MAB) launched in 1971 Project No. 11, “Ecological aspects of urban systems with particular emphasis on energy utiization”. Prescient for its days, MAB can thus be considered the pioneer in ecosystem ecology and its application to (intergovernmental) sciences cooperation. As this project has continued relevance for present-day climate change and zero-emissions deliberations, one just wonders why it took more than three decades to become a coveted approach.
In 1983, Soviet scientist, Academician Oleg Yanitsky, then head of UNESCO’s MAB, described the complementary MAB project 13 “Perception of environmental quality” in an article in the International Social Sciences Journal (ISSC XXXIV N° 93) entitled "Towards an eco-city: problems of integrating knowledge with practice". In it, he defined an eco-city as "a human settlement of the future in which social and ecological processes are harmonized in the best possible way." Yet, "the concept of a human settlement as an ecosystem is far from clear ... the transition from hunting and gathering to economic activity, from the use of natural resources to their reproduction as traced by social history provides the basis for the construction of the eco-city concept. This historical approach appears the soundest and corresponds to the idea of 'eco-social development'."
On-line the term is attributed to someone else: "Richard Register first coined the term "ecocity" in his 1987 book, Ecocity Berkeley: building cities for a healthy future”(http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Ecocities)
Register is also cited as founder of the annual, global Eco-city Conferences, the first of which was held in Berkley CA in 1999. The next edition will take place in Istanbul in December 2009 http://www.ecocity2009.com/ Another leading proponent of sustainable cities was architect Paul F. Downton, who founded the company Ecopolis Architects.
UNEP, which came into being in 1972, embraced thereafter the concept. The Convention of Biological Diversity, concluded at the Rio Summit in 1992, included the ecosystem approach in its international legal framework.
Today, a sustainable city, ecocity or ecopolis is defined as an entire city dedicated to minimizing the required inputs (of energy, water and food) and its waste output (of heat, greenhouse gases, water pollution and waste). A sustainable city can feed and power itself with minimal reliance on the surrounding countryside, and creates the smallest possible ecological footprint for its residents. This results in a city that is friendly to the surrounding environment, in terms of pollution, and land use, and which contributes to the alleviation of global warming.
Yanitsky’s article was prescient indeed. In a rapidly growing and urbanizing world, due to population growth and migration flows, cities are bound to play a significant role in any national climate change action and the building of a green society and green economy. More than half of the world’s population, more than 3 billion people, live now in cities. Urbanization can thus be both a pillar and an engine of eco-development and in the fight against poverty.
China’s urbanization rate in 2005 was 43%. Over the next 10-15 years it is expected to rise to well over 50%, adding an additional 200 million people to the current urban population of some 560 million. Growing cities and a growing number of cities will greatly increase consumption of energy and water and contribute to the emissions of greenhouse gases. The way how urban centers organize themselves and their economic activities including the type and location of jobs, their transport and waste management, their water management and the urban environment, including physical infrastructure and urban services, will be a key determinant for the eco-propensity of a city. Considering the expansion of cities as such, it will be a major determining factor for the emergence of a green economy at the national level.
The international debate on eco-cities has run quite a diverse course. We can distinguish several different approaches: