Measuring environmental resilience

With urbanisation predicted to rise to 70 per cent worldwide by 2050, and an imperative to achieve sustainable growth that limits global warming to under 1.5 degrees, it is clear that many of the answers lie with cities.

Extreme weather events have increased significantly over the past 40 years, and the UN has been instrumental in developing and disseminating the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction to help cities develop resilience to such risks.

Furthermore, appalling traffic congestion and air pollution are blighting major cities around the world and, notwithstanding its highly praised integrated public transport system, London suffers from both. That is why, in his Transport Strategy (March 2018), the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has stressed reducing reliance on the motor car in the years ahead, both to reduce emissions and to promote more active mobility.

Figure 2 below shows how well the different boroughs are contributing to this agenda, as well as the volume of waste generated by each community and the propensity to re-use or recycle.

In addition, it shows the proportion of households with easy access to a local park, which is an important contributor to good quality of life. Unfortunately, data on water consumption, leakages and the take-up of metering by boroughs does not seem to be available.

According to the 2011 Census, Greenwich has the highest proportion of its residents working within the Borough. However, it also has the highest percentage (44 per cent) using private vehicles as their mode of transport to work.

Of course, access to public transport in the south and east of the borough does not compare with Islington in central London, where only 10 per cent use their cars to travel to work. However, this need to find new ways of facilitating access to public transport partly explains why Greenwich has been at the forefront of experiments with connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) and is one of only two live urban testbeds in the UK.

It also explains why the borough was keen to explore, through the EU Sharing Cities project, how to integrate new sources of renewable energy with electric vehicle/e-bike recharging and smart metering in residential properties to better understand how strategic energy management systems can transform energy efficiency and consumer behaviours at the community level and improve air quality.

Political and social resilience

The ability and the agility of local government to help its community to respond to the challenges they face is the hardest to measure and yet the most important.

In part it relates to creating a place that generates a wide range of employment opportunities and a healthy environment, as discussed above, but also to the challenges and resource costs of supporting an ageing population and, at a time when private rents are so high, offering housing to those in need.

Commentators point to the lack of autonomy of UK local authorities – the high proportion of local spending derived from central government grants – but funding models are changing, with experiments around retained business rates.

The ability and the agility of local government to help its community to respond to the challenges they face is the hardest to measure and yet the most important.

Figure 3 below reflects these potential costs and long-term challenges, as well as showing the degree of autonomy and the longer-term potential of employment capacity, i.e. business rates, to contribute to funding.

As before, local authorities need to focus on areas where they are nearer to the centre of the graph. For example, it is predicted that while Islington will have a population aged 65+ of around 30,000 by 2030, Greenwich’s over-65s will number 41,000 – the highest of the boroughs.

In addition, current expenditure on adult social care and public health per household is above those of other boroughs, and a longer-term challenge is looming in the form of a high incidence of diabetes among the over-17s.

Moreover, while the lowest quartile of income earners pay a lower proportion of their gross income on private rents – the lowest of the sample of boroughs – the Council faces high demand for social housing, with 11.5 per cent of households on the housing waiting list.

In the longer term, Greenwich would seem to have much greater potential than Lewisham to generate business rate income, but Newham would seem to be best placed with a significant increase in commercial property development over the period 2020-2036.

(Note on Figure 4: The size of the ‘lollipops’ is random; it does not relate to the size of the boroughs. The origin of the axes is 5 (or 50%) rather than 0, to provide space/clarity.)

Before drawing some policy conclusions, it is interesting to see how borough performance compares along these three axes by developing composite indicators, based on the results for each of the three themes, and presenting the results in the form of a 3D XYZ chart, as shown in Figure 4 above.

Whereas Islington and Southwark appear to be resilient to technological/global and environmental change, Islington may wish to focus on its ability to cope with longer-term political and social challenges.

Greenwich, Lewisham and Newham, on the other hand, might wish to focus on technological/global resilience as well as the steps they might take to address longer-term challenges.

Change is the constant

We don’t know what the future holds, but it is clear that further developments in digital technology will result in further disruption to business and society, and that radical solutions are needed to address the challenges of sustainable growth, environmental degradation and demographic change.

Cities provide many of the answers. While several have ‘vision’ reports out to 2040 or 2050, it is questionable whether they are evidence-based or have adaptability/flexibility at their heart.

To bring this into focus, I would suggest the following:

• Cities, working as a network with central government and stakeholders (including business and universities), should develop scenario-planning approaches to analysing what the future might realistically hold. In a world of paradigm shifts, too much strategic thinking is based on linear trends.
  
  
• Drawing on Sustainable Development Goals, cities should develop a series of indicators that will help them assess their adaptability to a range of scenarios, and to monitor which scenario is becoming the most likely.
  
  
• This combination of benchmarks and longer-term scenarios provides the basis for developing (smart) city strategies and the priorities for investment.
  
  
• These strategies need to be holistic, but digital technologies and the data that they generate will be key to developing adequate responses. The sooner boroughs, towns and cities develop the digital infrastructure and skills to manage that data, the more resilient they will be.

I welcome your feedback and questions on this approach. This article is an open invitation to contribute to the debate.

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