Your new post is loading...
A United Nations conference seeks urban sustainability. But the agenda will fail without input from researchers, warn Timon McPhearson and colleagues.
More urban areas will be built in the next 30 years than ever before. Growing settlements will increase demand for infrastructure, food, energy, water and housing. Simply meeting the projected urban expansion will breach the warming limit set by the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
This week, the United Nations' third major global cities conference, Habitat III, convenes in Quito, Ecuador. Held every 20 years, this multilateral meeting will adopt a global framework for making cities more sustainable — the New Urban Agenda (NUA). Sadly, science was largely absent from the drafting process of the NUA. By contrast, expert evidence guided the Paris climate deal, the 2015 Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Via Crenau
