15  Cities, human security and global environmental change

David Simon and Hayley Leck

Introduction

This chapter contributes to nascent efforts to integrate human security perspectives into the hitherto largely neglected urban (as opposed to global, national and rural) dimensions of global environmental change. Key urban challenges for human security in the context of environmental change relate to overall ecological footprints, maintaining institutional and infrastructural integrity, and safeguarding shelter, utilities, economic activities and livelihoods. These take on somewhat different complexions in coastal and inland urban areas. While in wealthier parts of the world, urbanization levels have generally been stable or declining, they are much more diverse and variable in poorer countries and regions due to differing and complex interacting forces and processes. These increasingly include rural impoverishment and hunger through the adverse effects of environmental change on rural livelihoods. Moreover, megacities, which face complex human security challenges in hosting often predominantly poor populations, are increasing rapidly in number and overall concentration in developing contexts (Bohle and Warner, 2008). Providing for large in-migrant populations in expanding cities with inadequate resourcing whilst simultaneously seeking to mitigate and adapt to the effects of environmental change poses severe challenges that are likely to threaten political stability and human security in many contexts.

The Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) Science Plan (Lonergan et al., 1999) was produced in the late 1990s, at a time when concern for urban issues was beginning to rise up the international development agenda again after a period dominated by rural concerns. Global environmental change research up to that time had also been dominated by issues of global governance and essentially rural dynamics like land use and cover change that were amenable to remote sensing analysis. Hence it is perhaps unsurprising that the GECHS Science Plan makes only passing reference to urban issues in the summary of research foci. Focus 3 refers to “urbanization and human security” (Lonergan et al., 1999: 29, 30). Despite initial insubstantial attention (GECHS, 2003; Leitmann, 2003; Gutberlet, 2003), GECHS has engaged increasingly over time with urban issues, especially through several Associates and collaboration with the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change’s (IHDP) Urbanization and Global Environmental Change (UGEC) core project. The first concrete evidence of this was the joint UGEC/GECHS publication in 2007, which contends that insufficient attention has been paid to the tight linkages between global environmental change, human security and urbanization to date. The contributing authors argue for the adoption of multidimensional perspectives, more appropriate for providing integrated approaches for understanding the implications of these links and associated events (IHDP Update, 2007). Recently, urban research has featured more prominently in GECHS publications (e.g. Matthew et al., 2010) while the GECHS synthesis conference (June, 2009) included several urban sessions, signaling growing awareness of the importance of urban dimensions of human security.

Against this background and as a contribution to the assessment of GECHS’ achievements that this volume represents, we now assess the extent of urban global environmental change – human security engagement more broadly and outline some directions for future research.

Urban global environmental change research into human security

The UGEC core project’s Science Plan (Sánchez-Rodríguez et al., 2005: 34) stipulates that research on adaptation strategies to the adverse effects of environmental change necessitates “a better understanding of the structural causes behind the vulnerability of urban systems to those impacts.” Here, there is considerable potential for UGEC and GECHS collaboration as GECHS research is also centrally concerned with understanding the underlying social, economic and political processes contributing to injustices and vulnerabilities with respect to adverse environmental change effects (Lonergan et al., 1999). Moreover, vulnerability analysis constitutes a core focus of both projects. Incorporating an urban focus into GECHS research does not warrant a completely new toolkit as such, but rather the adaption of existing methodologies, conceptual frameworks and tools to the urban context. Indeed, various approaches and methodological tools predominantly associated with the “rural” have more recently been applied successfully to urban contexts. For instance, urban disaster risk reduction is now well established (e.g. Pelling and Wisner, 2009) while a combination of political ecological and sustainable livelihoods analyses appears valuable for developing crucial new insights into urban areas because “[v]ulnerability to disaster and the impacts of gradual GEC erode the rights and opportunities of urban poor” (Parnell et al., 2007: 9).

Much urban research into environmental change risks, vulnerabilities and coping mechanisms inevitably addresses aspects of human security but without either doing so explicitly or invoking a human security framework. In other words, using explicit coverage of human security within urban environmental change research as an indicator underestimates the degree of integration or commonality between these two agendas. One aspect of this relates to work on disaster risk reduction, which has addressed human security and risk (e.g. Pelling and Wisner, 2009), and which has become increasingly integrated with environmental change research over recent years, even if not explicitly acknowledged (Romieu et al., 2010; Simon, 2010; Manuel-Navarrete et al., 2011; see also the contributions to Environment and Urbanization, 2011).

Urbanization and global environmental change

Urbanization, globalization and accelerated environmental change are perhaps the three most powerful anthropogenic forces on earth. Homo sapiens has now become a predominantly urban species. The actual significance of this urban shift and associated consequences, particularly in terms of the adverse effects of environmental change and human security implications, is yet to be adequately contemplated and acted upon. Humankind’s urban locus is an unprecedented phenomenon, which brings with it unprecedented implications and challenges, particularly in terms of environmental change and human security issues. This urban shift is expected to persist over the coming decades, particularly in poorer countries where rising aspirations and widespread deterioration of rural livelihoods caused by many interacting forces are driving large scale rural-urban migration.¹ As Martine et al. (2008: 3) remind us, “cities are also at the heart of local, national and global environmental change.” Yet, remarkably, “discussions about global environmental problems and the possibilities for a ‘sustainable’ future customarily ignore the urban origin of many problems” (Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003: 899). Helm and Hepburn (2009) represent a recent example of this tendency.

Fundamentally, while cities contribute greatly to environmental problems and also concentrate them spatially, cities must also be recognized as crucial to most solutions (Bohle and Warner, 2008; Martine et al., 2008; Pelling and Wisner, 2009). Cities contain vast potential in terms of economies of scale and the potential of urbanization to contribute to environmental sustainability needs to be further recognized and exploited. Crucially, therefore, urbanization and environmental change have a bidirectional relationship; urbanization should be understood as both a cause and an effect of environmental change (Sánchez-Rodríguez et al., 2005; Simon, 2007; Sánchez-Rodríguez, 2008; Dawson et al., 2009). Urban areas worldwide constitute engines of economic growth, concentrating a multitude of economic activities within often densely populated built-up areas as part of ongoing globalization processes.

Moreover, both environmental change and economic globalization result in “winners” and “losers” (admittedly problematic terms in themselves) and the combination of the two phenomena can result in double winners or double losers. Attention to socio-environmental justice is thus essential (Barnett, 2006; Leichenko and O’Brien, 2006; Parnell et al., 2007). Hence, the impacts of globalization and environmental change need to be considered simultaneously in all development plans since the interaction of these two evolving phenomena will modify and create new complex vulnerabilities to their combined effects. Such a holistic focus has been somewhat lacking in the urban literature to date since, while both phenomena are receiving unprecedented attention, they have not been considered together to a sufficient degree.

Vulnerability to adverse environmental change effects in urban areas is caused by various interconnected and multiscalar social, economic, political and environmental factors. Each factor contributes to vulnerability or, conversely, to resilience to the effects of environmental change (Dawson et al., 2009). Moser et al. (1994, cited in Pelling, 2003: 57–58) usefully identify three features of urban life and livelihoods which distinguish rural and urban experiences of vulnerability as follows: “urban life is more commodified than rural life”; the “complexity of environmental risk is greater”; and “there is greater social fragmentation because of high residential mobility and the loss of support networks.”

This notwithstanding, it is also critical not to lose sight of the close interconnectedness and bidirectional interactions characterizing the rural-urban continuum. Environmental pressures and degradation in rural areas also contribute to increased hazard and environmental degradation in urban areas and vice-versa, particularly when coastal systems are affected. As has been emphasized elsewhere (e.g. Pelling, 2003; Sánchez-Rodríguez et al., 2005; Parnell et al., 2007; Moser and Satterthwaite, 2008) urban-rural linkages are vital for mitigation and adaptation to environmental change, for instance, in terms of providing greater flexibility for risk spreading and opportunity enhancement across different activity spaces. Therefore, efforts at enhancing human security in urban areas are closely linked to activities in rural areas. As such, horizontal collaboration between rural and urban authorities is crucial to enhancing regional human security.

Most urban areas are periodically subject to dramatic crises, caused by interconnected biophysical, socio-economic and political factors. As Fragkias (2007: 25) notes, individual cities have unique “stress bundles” which can be best identified through integrative research approaches. “Stress bundles” consist of environmental factors (such as the combined effect of sea level rise and storm surge), that interact with physical characteristics (such as flood-prone or landslide prone areas) and socio-economic characteristics (such as increasing inequalities and polarization), which all combine to create different vulnerability contexts for urban inhabitants. Furthermore, urban environmental change risks and associated human security threats arise from macro-scale shortfalls in tackling global and national inequality, coupled with failures at local scales in implementing sustainable urban development (Barnett and Adger, 2005; Parnell et al., 2007; Bohle and Warner, 2008). Underlying this is the more profound issue of how risk is conceptualized and communicated among different epistemic communities and social groups, and how their respective values affect the responses and realistic extents of behavioral change to enhance their (human) security in respect of disaster risk and environmental change (Hulme, 2009: 211–247; O’Brien, 2009; Brauch, 2011) – in this case in urban contexts, where there is considerable scope for further research.

The vulnerabilities of coastal urban settlements to the effects of environmental change are significant and could potentially lead to widespread erosion of human security. The 2008/9 State of the World’s Cities report (UN-Habitat, 2008: 141) cautions that failure to adapt port cities and urban coastal settlements risks creating devastating local and international consequences and “any rise in sea level is therefore potentially catastrophic for millions of urban dwellers and the global economy.” Coastal zones vulnerable to the combined effects of sea level rise and storm surge are, of course, home to rural populations as well, but urban populations predominate. Almost half of the world’s largest cities are situated within 50 kilometers of the coast and coastal population densities are 2.6 times greater than inland population densities (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). This situation is likely to remain largely unchanged in the foreseeable future given that urbanization rates and levels in coastal areas are higher than in any other environment in the world (UN-Habitat, 2008: 142; see also Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005; McGranahan et al., 2007; Simon, 2010).

Urban human security and meeting basic needs

As alluded to above, environmental change and human security are linked in complex and multifaceted ways across diverse sectors in urban contexts and vary both temporally and spatially. Building on this, the following section highlights some of the key connections between predicted climate change impacts, meeting basic needs (with particular reference to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)) and human security.

The most explicitly urban MDG is Target 11 within MDG 7 (Environmental Sustainability). As modified by UN-Habitat in May 2003, this target reads:

At current rates of progress, there is little prospect of this target being achieved by the deadline, especially in countries with large low-income urban populations. Since shelter is one of the most fundamental basic human needs, and inadequate shelter is often associated with deficiencies in relation to other basic needs, this situation raises the very real prospect of an ongoing threat to urban human security by virtue of the failure of many of the world’s poorest urban residents adequately to meet their basic needs, even in the absence of significant environmental change impacts. Climate change is already having adverse impacts on urban areas worldwide and will, in many cases, affect the poorest and most vulnerable sectors of urban populations most severely (McGranahan et al., 2007; Parnell et al., 2007; Satterthwaite et al., 2007; Simon, 2007, 2010; Douglas et al., 2008; Hardoy and Pandiella, 2009; Little and Cocklin, 2010; Ahammad, 2011; Banks et al., 2011). Since these groups are often already at acute risk from other forms of disaster (Pelling and Wisner, 2009), their vulnerability will be exacerbated by urban displacement and threats to their existing livelihoods, however inadequate these are.

In this context, it is useful to explore more fully the likely climate change implications for urban human security in the short-, medium- and long-term time horizons of the projections in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC, 2007), namely 2009–2020, 2021–2050 and 2051–2100 respectively (Wisner et al., 2007).

The short-term urban implications for many of the basic needs will be mutually reinforcing. For example, food shortages leading to malnutrition will probably exacerbate urban unrest of the sort already seen during “bread riots” when food is scarce and prices rise in poorer countries, reduce labor productivity and contribute to greater vulnerability to diseases (health). Similarly, failure to meet the urban water MDG will impact upon health, morbidity and labor productivity (Wisner et al., 2007). The impacts in respect of mega-projects, disasters and gradual increases in urban displacement through sea level rise will exacerbate unemployment and are likely to increase political pressure for mitigation and adaptation interventions (Wisner et al., 2007).

In the medium term (2021–2050), increased rural displacements as a result of food insecurity, water shortages in many areas, mega-projects and disasters will reinforce peri-urban and intra-urban pressures under all the basic needs headings. There is a real prospect that vulnerable urban residents will seek to leave cities in search of greater security elsewhere just as the rural displacees head to town. The consequences will be contingent on the balance of these countervailing processes and other local dynamics in each case (Wisner et al., 2007).

In the longer term (2051–2100), sea level rise and heat island effects coupled with salinization of freshwater in coastal aquifers from which a significant proportion of coastal urban water supply is derived, will greatly exacerbate the urban sustainability challenge (Wisner et al., 2007). Furthermore, long distance water transfer to cities will become increasingly precarious in areas experiencing more variable and declining rainfall and increased ambient temperatures because of greater evapotranspiration, reduced supply and increasing rural demand. By mid-century sea level rise in many low- and mid-latitude regions is likely to be at least 20–30 centimeters, submerging or threatening most low-lying parts of coastal urban areas. While wealthier residents may have the resources and resilience to cope, many poorer, more vulnerable residents are likely to lose their homes and livelihoods, requiring large-scale public intervention and international aid. Although there is considerable socio-economic and spatial overlap, poverty and vulnerability are rarely synonymous, even in urban areas (Eriksen and O’Brien, 2007; Parnell et al., 2007; Douglas et al., 2008; Hardoy and Pandiella, 2009). The combined effect of all these short- to long-term impacts will probably be increased political and social upheaval, threatening the stability and survival of urban local authorities as well as regional and national governments. Because of the concentration of environmental change-related impacts in cities, the human security threat posed by environmental change impacts in urban areas could become even more profound than that from changes in rural areas. Added to this is the key role that the integrity of urban infrastructure plays in determining levels of human security, something which has only recently emerged as a prominent concern in human security debates (e.g. Pelling and Wisner, 2009; Dalby, 2009; Monstadt, 2009). Indeed, water, waste, energy and transport systems infrastructure is central to the promotion of sustainable urban development and human security (Monstadt, 2009).

From the perspective of political leaders, the implications of the culmination of all the above-mentioned impacts, together with inadequate and inappropriate urban infrastructure and urban governance will quite literally make cities increasingly ungovernable through direct protest action. Thus, adopting a three-pronged strategy that simultaneously accounts for immediate, medium- and long-term concerns is crucial for progressing along sustainable development paths in the context of unprecedented environmental change and linked human security threats. However, politicians and political leaders are often predisposed to adopting short-term developmental outlooks based on election periods.

The way forward

Environmental change poses significant threats to human security. Such threats are likely to escalate in the near and long term future as a result of failure to meet MDGs in the context of increasing environmental change impacts. It is in urban areas that these impacts are likely to be most acutely felt, threatening the lives and livelihood security of millions of urban residents, particularly in poorer countries. Thus, the rising awareness of the urban-specific issues associated with environmental change and human security needs to be more urgently acted upon. Accordingly, key urban challenges in the context of environmental change and GECHS need to be recognized explicitly and incorporated into research endeavors as well as policy and practical action on the ground.

In research terms, much progress has been made in the last few years as a result of greater synergies between the respective GECHS and UGEC agendas but also in highlighting the complementarities between disaster risk reduction and environmental change perspectives, for instance. Seeking to understand how risk is conceived, communicated and responded to by different actors and stakeholder groups in the face of changing urban conditions is one good example of where potential compatibility among these perspectives exist. Taking these agendas forward will require further holistic and coordinated research linking up various approaches from the urban, disaster risk reduction, GECHS, UGEC and other literatures. Such collaborative and inclusive research offers the greatest potential to formulate crucial new insights to guide the research community, practitioners, policy makers, NGOs and civil society alike in meeting the imperative of enhancing urban human security.

Programmatically, the MDG period ends in 2015 and there is currently much debate about their successors, likely to be styled Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). If the MDG shortcomings in relation to urban and human security issues identified above can be addressed by giving them greater coherence in one or more SDGs, the prospects for achieving measurable action will be enhanced because of the way in which such targets become embedded in international development assistance and national government expenditure negotiations. Although the instrumentality of such apparent accountability needs to be recognized, greater progress is likely than without such goals and the associated commitments. Some of these commitments apply at the subnational, in this case urban, scale. More broadly, since urban local authorities are the most important state-sector actors in driving urban environmental change mitigation, adaptation and transformation, it is also vital that more holistic understandings of urban human security issues are embedded in their development/planning and implementation agendas.

Acknowledgments

This is an updated and revised precis of the paper presented in the session on Cities and Climate Change: Human Security Challenges, at the GECHS Synthesis Conference, “Human Security in an Era of Global Change,” Oslo, 23 June 2009. Thanks to the organizers for the invitation to participate and for comments on the draft; session participants also provided helpful feedback. A different version of the full paper appeared as “Urbanizing the Global Environmental Change and Human Security Agendas” in Climate and Development 2, 2010: 263–275.

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