- Environment Agency chief will highlight the future of city
living and call for more to be done to create sustainable cities
of the future
- Cities could be the solution to not cause of climate woes
Speaking at Imperial College
London today (Tuesday 24 January), Sir , Chief Executive of the
Environment Agency, will outline his vision of a
‘citytopia’ – the best place
to live in the future alongside a changing climate.
He will point to developments
such as the Olympic Park as offering the urban environments of
the future, where green space and sustainable homes sit side by
side.
Sir will warn that while our cities
of the 21st
century are no longer enveloped in thick smog – led in part by
action from the Environment Agency to reduce harmful pollutants
from industry – and wildlife is returning to our city’s rivers,
there is much more to be done to create the efficient and climate
resilient cities of the future.
Setting out his vision of the future, he will say:
“The Citytopia of the
future would be the best possible place to live: for wildlife as
much as for people. That means more green (and blue) alongside
the grey and black.
“As well as efforts to
create better access to green space, our cities would
have embedded sustainable drainage which increases the ability of
our cities and their drainage systems to absorb large amounts of
water when it rains, for example, by creating parks to act as
giant sponges or putting grass on roofs to allow rainwater to
drain away gradually.
“As our cities grow and our
current drains reach full capacity, as we concrete over areas
that used to act as natural drains, and as climate change brings
us bigger and more violent rainfall, these schemes can make all
the difference between basements, underpasses, city centres and
Tube lines that are flooded and dangerous, and a city that just
shrugs its shoulders, puts up its umbrellas, and keeps
going.”
For the first time in history,
more people now live in cities and urban environments than the
countryside. He will describe how his city of the future would be
the solution to – and not part of – the climate problem:
“This Citytopia would no
longer be part of the climate problem, because it would not be
emitting the greenhouse gases that are causing our climate to
change. It would achieve that with the right transport systems,
so that people could easily walk or cycle to wherever they wanted
to go or use cheap and convenient public transport fuelled by
renewable energy.
“It would have buildings
designed to be energy efficient, heated by solar or other
renewable energy and cooled by natural airflow designed into the
building at the start. It would use all its resources efficiently
and turn all its waste back into a resource to be reused again.
It would have arrangements that allowed its inhabitants to share
many of the things they needed – such as bicycles and vehicles –
without having to buy or own them all, thus vastly reducing the
carbon cost of producing, consuming and disposing of all the
stuff we currently feel we have to each own ourselves.”
“It would also be a major part of the
solution. Its green areas – parks, woodland, grasslands,
flowerbeds, football pitches – would all be acting as carbon
sinks, taking damaging carbon out of the atmosphere and so
reducing the extent of climate change. In its design and its
infrastructure our city would be perfectly adapted to living
safely and well in a climate-changed world.
“It would have flood defences that protected people from the
worst that the violent weather caused by a changing climate could
fling at it. It would have power and transport systems designed
to cope just as well with periods of high temperature and drought
as with record-breaking rainfall”
Sir James will urge the need
for innovation to achieve Net Zero targets. He will also call for
better collaboration and imagination to ensure that climate
positive and nature rich cities are a key cornerstone in our
sustainable future.
