The Best City? You Can’t Ignore Climate Anymore
The Internet provides many websites that rate the “livability” of cities around the U.S. and the world: “The Top 100 Best Places to Live in America,” “America’s 50 Best Cities,” “Where Are the Best and Worst Cities to Retire,” and many others. They compare many indicators of cities’ performance: the cost of living, crime rate, salaries, unemployment rate, number of physicians, air and water quality, religiousness, school graduation rates, voting participation, real estate prices, taxes, and other factors.
But these raters don’t assess a city’s viability in the era of climate change. They don’t ask if cities like Boston, Paris, Shanghai, or Rio de Janeiro will be well prepared for the most disruptive weather that is likely to occur. Or if cities like San Francisco, Copenhagen, Mexico City, or Sydney are well on their way to de-carbonizing their energy supply, or putting the needs of pedestrians, bicyclists, and mass-transit riders ahead of the needs of cars, or rapidly greening their building stock, or minimizing consumption of materials and the unnecessary creation of waste. “There’s a dog’s breakfast of systems to rank cities,” observes Gregor Robertson, mayor of Vancouver, which set the goal of being the world’s greenest city. “But there’s nothing rigorous about it.”
Some cities may be lucky when it comes to certain challenges of the post-carbon, climate-change era we are entering. In 2016 The New York Times identified a set of North American cities that would be good bets for escaping the harshest effects of climate change—because they are favorably positioned by topography or geography. Coastal Portland, Maine, for instance, lies high enough above sea level to avoid inundation and far enough to the north to avoid systemic drought. Detroit, Chicago, and Madison, Wisconsin, all in the Great Lakes region, will have to cope with weather that is somewhat warmer and wetter, but not nearly as altered and challenging as cities further to the south, and they have access to plenty of fresh water.
But luck will not be enough for achieving urban success in the face of climate change. Success depends on decisions a city is making now and in the next few years. That's what city ratings should be telling us about.
