It’s not uncommon for somebody to ask us: why cities? After all, Microsoft Research has innovative initiatives in all sorts of places — FarmBeats has developed solutions for the world’s smallholder farmers; Project Premonition traps disease-carrying insects in places as remote as the forests of Tanzania. But we think that, when it comes to climate change, there’s both a need and an opportunity in focusing on urban places.
The need is glaring: cities are frontline communities for the impacts of a changing climate. Many global cities sprang up around ports, building their economies on trade. Now, the majority of the world’s largest cities are at risk of sitting below sea level. The effects of increasingly frequent and extreme heatwaves are likely to be magnified in cities, the IPCC reports, by the urban heat island effect — the disproportionate heating of urban areas due to pavement and other heat-absorbing surfaces and a lack of vegetation. And the impacts of climate change on rural areas – droughts and bad harvests – ripple through urban areas as people are pushed to migrate, often arriving in informal settlements that are disproportionately vulnerable to heat, floods, and storms. In the absence of intervention, these climate-exacerbated events have the potential not only to cause harm to people–two-thirds of whom will live in cities by 2050–and to erode global wealth, which is disproportionately produced in cities, but also to exacerbate inequality.
For all their vulnerabilities, cities remain places of opportunity. When it comes to climate change mitigation, an initiative in a single city can have major impacts: In New York City, buildings account for an estimated two-thirds of all emissions; the City recently became the first to require efficiency upgrades of the 50,000+ buildings in the city that are over 25,000 square feet — a change expected to reduce the emissions by 10%. And a success in one city can easily be scaled elsewhere: globally, 23 cities have committed to a net zero buildings declaration; 34 cities have agreed to procure only zero-emissions buses; and 28 cities have pledged to move towards zero waste futures. For the major sources of emissions in cities – buildings, transportation, and waste – there are an increasing number of scalable solutions that urban leaders can easily adopt. Since the bulk of GHG emissions are attributable to cities – 70%, according to the United Nations – these commitments can have a major global impact.
Our group is developing technological solutions for cities because cities are where the majority of humans live and work. Cities are where most people will experience the effects of a changing climate, and where there is the most potential to reduce emissions quickly. There’s one more reason to focus on developing new technologies in urban spaces: cities are laboratories of democracy. Cities are places where innovations can get immediate feedback from residents, and where no innovation can be successful without the buy-in of residents. While that’s a high barrier to clear, it’s also increasingly clear that social and political buy-in is among the most important need for anyone working to address climate change. If we wish to solve big problems, we need to be able to build broad and multifaceted collaborations – and our team has found extraordinary partners in the cities in which we have begun to work.
There is no simple, technological solution that will give us back a pre-carbonized world. There are only assemblages of numerous small solutions, promoted by political leaders and adopted and implemented by communities, that – together – will produce measurable improvements. By working not just in cities, but with cities, we can co-develop the social and political structures needed to ensure that our technological solutions work, and work for everyone.
Author: Madeleine Daepp (Urban Planner/Senior Researcher)
