Mankind consumes more resources than our planet produces. What’s more, the numbers of people moving to cities are constantly on the rise. Together, these two aspects are becoming the key factor when it comes to the sustainability of our society.
Mankind is living beyond its means. In total, we consume 50 per cent more resources every year than the earth can reproduce and sustainably make available to us within this period. This is the central finding of the Living Planet Report 2014, which is produced by conservation organisation the WWF every two years. According to the global status report, the debts that mankind owes to nature are increasing, whereas ecological reserves are decreasing. For the past four decades, the Living Planet Index has recorded a decline in biodiversity of 52 per cent. On average, the number of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish studied has halved.
We need two planets
“The mountain of debt we are accumulating is getting bigger and bigger,” warns Director of WWF Germany Eberhard Brandes. “Climate change, species extinction and water shortage – the effects of how we are living on credit are already clearly being felt. We are about to exceed our credit limit at the expense of our children.” According to Brandes, responsibility for this global overuse lies primarily with prosperous countries and large industrialised nations such as Germany and the USA.
The approximately 8.5 billion people who will be living on earth in 2030 will need water, energy, space and materials. This may well see growth in the global economy – but our planet cannot keep up with this rate of development: if we don’t change how we act, we will need a biocapacity that is twice as big as the earth can provide by 2030. In other words: we will need a second planet, and even as many as three earths by 2050.
Megacities are the future
Cities are the focal point of this development: between two and three billion people worldwide will stream from the countryside to the cities within just a few decades. The momentum of this throng of urbanisation is the main driving force of global change in the 21st century. This is highlighted by a report produced by the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU). Megacities with several million people are the future. In 2010, half the earth’s population already lived in urban areas. According to data from the UN, this figure is set to rise to around five billion by 2030 and to 6.4 billion people by 2050. The megatrend of urbanisation has already been going for quite a while. What is new, however, is that it is no longer Western industrialised nations that are driving this development, but emerging economies such as Brazil, Mexico, India and China. In China alone, there will be more than 221 cities with more than a million inhabitants by 2025. The demand for sustainable megacities is huge, and the challenges for large cities, but also for small and medium-sized urban areas too, are great – both from an economic, ecological, political, social and cultural perspective. The development of cities in Europe and North America will also continue to be a fascinating topic.
Questions about the future are decided in urban areas
“The growth of cities is so immense that it urgently needs to be steered in a new direction,” explains WBGU Co-Chair Dirk Messner, Director of the German Development Institute. If more and more new settlements were to be built with cement and steel in the cities of developed and emerging nations, by 2050, the energy needed to produce the building materials alone could release greenhouse gases that would virtually use up the budget allowing the global temperature increase to be kept within the 1.5 °C target. Cities are responsible for around 75 per cent of energy consumption and global CO2 emissions. With this in mind, urban areas provide the greatest potential in terms of control, efficiency and savings, and have a significant influence on global sustainability efforts. “Without decisive political action and international cooperation, the demand for resources and the CO2 emissions from urban development will put the natural foundations of human life at risk,” explains Messner.
“An extremely densely populated city such as Hong Kong is only viable because it takes in and digests oil, metals and foodstuffs from its surroundings and across the globe, and ejects what is left over, such as rubbish, waste water and exhaust gases, into the surroundings,” adds Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, also a WBGU Co-Chair and Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. The key questions about the future are decided in urban areas. “However, the decentralised approach to producing renewable energies, the circular economy and even the digital economy, for instance, enable de-densification – and even demand this to some extent.”
That is why an increasing number of cities are opting for high tech: cities need to become networked, green and smart in order to remain competitive, save resources and be able to meet challenges such as climate change and evolving urban societies. The Smart City is one approach aiming to prevent mankind’s mountain of debt to the planet from increasing beyond all measure.