Imagine you didn’t have indoor plumbing, electricity, or insulation and heating to keep you warm inside your home. Think about what this would mean for your quality of life. Now imagine, these hardships are compounded by increasingly frequent damage from hurricanes and flooding, or that your community’s water supply is unstable because of extreme heat and drought.
While you may not think this could be the case in urban habitats, sadly for millions of people living in cities throughout the developing world, this is reality. If you’re reading this, hopefully this doesn’t sound like the conditions you live in. However, it’s important that we all recognize the way our lifestyles can contribute to the climate crisis and have inadvertent negative effects on living conditions for vulnerable people.
At Arcadis, we’re working to change the way we live in cities in the developed world, to avoid even more catastrophic climate change impacts. Additionally, through the Shelter Program, a partnership between Arcadis and UN-Habitat, we are protecting people in urban habitats in the developing world from the crisis which is already upon us.
Mitigating climate change in the developed world Urban areas lay at the root of the carbon emissions problem, as they are responsible for over 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This means that we must rein in and achieve net zero carbon emissions in cities to mitigate global warming, and these are efforts that we must continually work towards over the next decades. The IPCC’s 2021 report on the physical science basis for climate change has made it clear that even with an immediate and drastic drop in global emissions global warming is set to continue through mid-century. (...)