Urban heat and air pollution in the built environment are interlinked and contribute to increased negative health impacts among urban dwellers. Sharon Onyango highlights the connection between these three factors within the transport sector developments in Africa, providing various urban planning strategies for mitigation to improve human health and wellbeing.
Climate change is the biggest challenge our cities are currently facing. Lance Jay Brown on the urgent need to transform them – and on the many ideas on how to do it.
The GIZ publication "Collaborative Climate Action - A Pre-Requisite for more Ambitious Climate Policy" explains why fighting climate change and its negative impacts requires the systematic cooperation of all governmental levels in order to be successful.
At COP25, the Desk Officer for Sustainable Urban Development at MISEREOR, Clara-Luisa Weichelt, talked to Emanuela Barbiroglio about the challenges of addressing climate change in informal settlements and human-rights based solutions.
When disasters hit, cultural heritage is often perceived as something passive, something hit by destruction. Conservation architect and risk management expert Rohit Jigyasu argues for a different perception: one that acknowledges the decisive role urban cultural heritage can play both in the prevention and in the outcome of natural disaster, making it an active component of urban resilience.
Current design standards for building infrastructure are based on outdated, historic climate data. In the face of climate change, planning, operation, maintenance, and management of infrastructure need to be revised, says urban environmental planner Riya Rahiman.
An increasing number of droughts, floods, and other hazards mean that more and more people are deciding to migrate. Ritwika Basu describes what is needed at the governance level to deal with climate change induced migration.
COP24 in Katowice, Poland, has come to an end. Environmental journalist Lou del Bello sums up what its outcomes hold for cities and regions.
It can no longer be denied that climate change has severe effects on our daily lives. As a response, the City of Cape Town has developed a policy that acknowledges climate change impacts as a pressing social and economic issue.
Saerbeck, Germany’s award-winning climate protection project serves as a model for many other towns. Ulrich Gunka shows how the municipality, working with its citizens, transformed a former army ammunition depot into a bioenergy park and how it shares their insights with other cities in the world.
With rising ocean water temperatures due to climate change, hurricanes are becoming stronger and last longer. This year, the Caribbean and parts of the US were hit by hurricane Irma, a particularly devastating storm. How can costal cities prepare for such disasters, and mitigate their effects? In an interview, Joseph Severe, Jean Frantz Jure and Nicolas Jean talk about the situation in Haiti.
"Building cities able to accommodate half a billion people over the next 30 years is one of the biggest transformations of our planet and we have to get it right", Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary-General stated at the Langenburg Forum for Sustainability. Read the full speech here on URBANET
To what extent can cities be used as ‘anthropogenic material stocks’? How can international cooperation contribute? In the following interview, Professor Liselotte Schebek from Darmstadt’s Technical University and Uwe Becker, who manages a GIZ-run project in India, share their views on these issues.
In recent years there have been great advancements in solid waste management and people are becoming more and more aware of its importance. However especially in developing countries there is still a need for more sustainable solutions. We spoke to Jiao Tang and Luis Marinheiro about the current situation in waste management and what still needs to be done to make it more sustainable and innovative.
Bangladeshi cities do not only have to face difficult climate conditions, but also increasing waves of urban migration and the problems associated with that. URBANET spoke to ANM Safiqul Alam, managing director of the software and planning company Geomark, about how Bangladesh is facing these challenges and why he is hopeful for the future of the country.
