What is an Urban Climate Innovation Laboratory?
These pioneering cities are trying, in just a few decades, to eliminate fossil fuels from their immense, complex systems and prepare to handle the grave impacts of climate change.
A city innovation lab isn't a facility with highly controlled conditions; it's the entire city--the complex, real urban world with its messy swarms of businesses, governments, and organizations; core urban systems; ideas, interests, and politics; built infrastructure, natural ecosystems, economic sectors; and, of course, all manner of people and groupings. These city labs exist on every populated continent.
As leaders in the climate struggle convene for the Global Climate Action Summit and Climate Week, the role of cities worldwide as active champions and innovators is becoming more and more prominent. Three decades ago, when the first warnings of global warming were sounded, almost no one looked to cities for a response. As we write in Life After Carbon:
"Cities were widely viewed as environmental villains, not saviors. . . . It was widely assumed that a serious response to climate change was up to national governments cooperating internationally. . . . The who did think about a role for cities weren't sure how much cities could do or would be willing to do to reduce GHG emissions."
In 2009. mayors showed up in force in Copenhagen to influence national leaders negotiating at a UN conference to reduce emissions, but they were kept on the sidelines. But six years later, when the UN tried again In Paris, cities were in the spotlight. The UN had announced that as much as 70% of global GHG emissions was produced in cities. Leaders from more than 400 cities assembled to press national leaders and pledge collective support for ambitious climate change efforts. In 2017, when President Trump announced his intention to withdraw the US from the Paris climate accord, nearly 300 American mayors rose up in defiance.
The mounting urban uproar, full-throated by 2018's fall events, has helped turn up the heat on national governments to take climate action. More significant, we explain in Life After Carbon, "has been the outpouring of urban climate innovations, which shows national leaders and everyone else that cities are doing a great deal--more than anyone expected--in response to climate change, and they could do even more. . . . A great surge of climate innovations designed, tested, and implemented by cities is sweeping through the world."
By studying the climate innovations produced in 25 of the world's most ambitious climate-action cities, we were able to discern a set of underlying radical ideas for urban change that have been triggered by the climate crisis. The first part of Life After Carbon studies these cities and their climate work. We call them "urban climate innovation laboratories"--
"Cities that have come to understand themselves, their place in the world, in a new way and act boldly on their changed awareness. They take to heart the challenge of climate change. They publicly commit to do more about it than many national governments have pledged. They immerse themselves in figuring out what they can do. And they start doing it, despite the many technical, political. economic, and social difficulties involved.
"They are changing just about everything in "the city"--the buildings, streets, neighborhoods, and other physical infrastructure; the supply and use of energy, water, transportation, green spaces, and other land; as well as the consumption of resources and disposal of waste. They are changing economic opportunities and the costs of doing business and living in the city. They are changing the minds and habits of their residents. They are changing the identities of their cities."
More about climate innovation lab cities--and the list of the 25 cities featured in Life After Carbon--here. Better yet, order the whole book from our publisher.
