Regenerative Urbanism is Key to Climate Solution 2

The IPCC released it’s Working Group III’s contribution today (4 April 2022) to its Sixth Assessment Report on humanity’s predicament. The “Remarks” page summarizes the situation as follows:

The IPCC report before us today is powerful evidence that we have the potential to mitigate climate change. 

We are at a crossroads. This is the time for action. We have the tools and know-how required to limit warming and secure a liveable future. 

This report provides the most recent scientific knowledge for sound decision-making with unique information about all sectors to complement the regional aspects provided by Working Groups I and II. 

It confirms that the IPCC is the authoritative scientific voice of the United Nations on climate change. IPCC is the unique interface between climate science and policy-making.

We will bring closure to the Sixth Assessment Cycle with the Synthesis Report this autumn.

The preceding IPCC reports are clear – human-induced climate change is widespread, rapid, and intensifying. It is a threat to our well-being and all other species.  It is a threat to the health of our entire planet. Any further delay in concerted global climate action will miss a rapidly closing window.

This is the report that gives us options. It offers strategies to tackle the critical questions of our time. How can we reduce greenhouse gas emissions? How can we sequester carbon? How can the buildings, transport, cities, agriculture, livestock, and energy sectors be more sustainable? 

This report also tells us the status of global emissions. It shows clearly that we are slipping from a trajectory to limit global warming to 1.5°C.

As compelling and accurate as the IPCC’s work is, and as laudable as humanity’s climate response to date has been, including Habitat III and the world’s Sustainable Development Goals, the climate challenge and solution is mis-framed to the point where the necessary solution path is invisible.

Yes, the technical solution is GHG reduction, essentially elimination of burning fossil fuels by 2040 or sooner given the pace of climate change accelerating ahead of modeled scenarios.

Yet, without understanding the other key components of the solution that enable the reduction of GHGs, the reduction won’t occur quickly enough, if at all.

If the solution to climate change does not include and simultaneously advance continued and accelerated inclusive global economic development and the sustainability success, our response will not be successful. The source of the climate crisis is the absence of production-ready alternative to a fossil-fuel-burning economy to meet human’s physical life support needs. Without it, there is no alternative but burning more oil, which hastens systems collapse. The source of the twin challenge, humanity’s accelerating unsustainability, is humanity’s eco-illiteracy, which allows human activity to systematically violate the principles and imperatives of nature’s regenerative life support system, plundering its wealth (natural capital) and continuously degrading it with impunity.

Fortunately, using a regenerative systems sustainability approach to the climate crisis will solve the twin problems simultaneously, and only for the price of climate change alone. It will create the renewable, solar, circular, economy that creates the material basis for inclusive prosperity and climate and sustainability success.

In addition, planning, designing, and developing the cities’ and regions’ built environments can play a substantial role in establishing the shift to a regenerative circular economy by creating a regenerative built environment. It would also provide a generative nudge for the full transition.

The White Paper, Regenerative Urbanism — A Synopsis: Inventing the Platform for Sustainability Success, summarizes this approach, and is described in the a previous post. See also the “Publications” page for a link to a 10 minute presentation of the white paper, and access to EcoCity Summit 2022 resources.