ABSTRACT
Global climate change is expected to pose increasing challenges for cities in the following decades, placing greater stress and impacts on multiple social and biophysical systems, including population health, coastal development, urban infrastructure, energy demand, and water supplies. Simultaneously, a strong global trend towards urbanisation of poverty exists, with increased challenges for urban populations and local governance to protect and sustain the well-being of growing cities. In the context of these 2 overarching trends, interdisciplinary research at the city scale is prioritised for understanding the social impacts of climate change and variability and for the evaluation of strategies in the built environment that might serve as adaptive responses to climate change. This article discusses 2 recent initiatives of The Earth Institute at Columbia University (EI) as examples of research that integrates the methods and objectives of several disciplines, including environmental health science and urban planning, to understand the potential public health impacts of global climate change and mitigative measures for the more localised effects of the urban heat island in the New York City metropolitan region. These efforts embody 2 distinct research approaches. The New York Climate & Health Project created a new integrated modeling system to assess the public health impacts of climate and land use change in the metropolitan region. The Cool City Project aims for more applied policy-oriented research that incorporates the local knowledge of community residents to understand the costs and benefits of interventions in the built environment that might serve to mitigate the harmful impacts of climate change and variability, and protect urban populations from health stressors associated with summertime heat. Both types of research are potentially useful for understanding the impacts of environmental change at the urban scale, the policies needed to address these challenges, and to train scholars capable of collaborative approaches across the social and biophysical sciences.
This decade marks history’s first recognition that a majority of humanity is urbanised – with over 50% of the planet’s 6.5 billion people expected to live in urban areas.1 Within this expanding urbanised population, poverty remains an entrenched and persistent reality for the estimated 1 billion people now living in slum-like conditions, often lacking a roof, secure tenure, sanitation, running water and clean air. Furthermore, cities are expected to absorb virtually all of the growth in global population over the next 25 years – an estimated 2 billion people, in an unprecedented and global shift in population from rural and agrarian to urban lives.2 Most of this population growth will take place in the cities of the developing world, where slums are expected to shelter at least an additional 1 billion people by 2030, during this time of the “final buildout of humanity,” before global population peaks at roughly 10 billion by 2050. The number of cities with over 5 million inhabitants is expected to rapidly increase, growing from 41 at present to a projected 59 in the next 10 years alone, with almost all of the growth in developing countries.3
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