Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
in. In the northern half of the country air pollution lops five and a half years off the average
life. (TE, Aug.10,
2013b
, p. 9)
These are some of the appalling consequences of China's recent rapid industrializa-
tion, a country that is also consuming over 40 % of many of the major metals and
now creating twice as much carbon emissions as the United States and a quarter of
the world total. Certainly there are many signs that China, with 19 % of the world
population of 7.2 billion in 2013, is now engaging in major efforts to clean up its
environmental degradation with new carbon reduction policies proclaimed in 2013.
For example, new carbon trading policies are designed to reduce emissions in its
largest cities (Qiu
2013
); new monitoring and, importantly, publication of air pol-
lution levels in 179 cities through its Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs
has been instituted; there are also promises of real time publication of the pollution,
waste water and heavy metal outputs of 15 thousand large enterprises, as well as ex-
hortations to public officials to reduce pollution levels. Such policies will take years
to achieve results, although hopefully at a far faster rate than the western countries
achieved in their main industrial growth period. Unfortunately many other countries
are doing little to alter their development path. For example, The WHO latest report
of air pollution estimates a rising death toll from 100 to 600,000 deaths in India
from air pollution alone from 2000 to 2010 (WHO
2014
). Many of the problems of
a lack of sustainability are starkly seen in our burgeoning cities, and have led some
municipalities to devise policies to at least mitigate the difficulties. But cities cannot
do this alone; the problems apply to regions and countries in general, so national
governments have to get involved. So to focus only on urban decision-making is
to ignore the effects of the wider context of the sustainability debate, which will be
dealt with in this chapter, leaving the next to deal with the specifically urban poli-
cies on sustainability.
Given the vast and expanding scope of this field this chapter can only provide
signposts on the way to a more sustainable future. The first section deals with some
general problems posed by limited sustainability, especially the negative exter-
nalities of our development processes. The second focuses on the difficulties of
defining the scope of sustainability, especially the development of useful indica-
tors to measure the degree of sustainability in urban places, with an example of a
comparative study of sustainability in major world cities. Subsequent sections deal
with the problems associated with major resources and outputs, initially water and
sewage, and then the crucial resource of energy, including the prospects for renew-
able sources. This is followed by a review of sustainable progress in two major
sectors, namely industrial processes and transport, which are essential components
of the functioning of the urban economy. Space limitations mean that other vital
resources, such as food supply, cannot be dealt with in this essentially urban-based
discussion. It must also be admitted that many of the problems and changes taking
place in the these resources and sectors involve decisions at a national level, but
they need to be reviewed since they have huge effects upon the sustainability of
individual urban places, although there is often room for local modification through
municipal actions.
