By Dr. Shay Hershkovitz, VP Climate Action at SparkBeyond and Colin Harrison, Co-Founder of the Pivot Projects
September 9 in the Bay Area was supposed to be just like any other day, only it wasn’t. The sky was painted in a sickly dark orange. Morning seemed like dawn. I stayed at home, closed all doors and windows, and sealed the fireplace.
As I was sitting at my desk, coughing with a running nose and lights turned on as if it was the middle of the night, it struck me: this is how our children's and grandchildren's lives will look.
It was like traveling to the future in a time machine, only the future looked bad. Really bad.
Many think that the key for solving the climate crisis is by governments taking direct action, in ways such as enacting policies that would encourage a speedy transition to clean energy, such as solar and wind. The reality, however, is that in the current political and economic climate, with too many global leaders being climate skeptics, and the slow pace in which global policies are determined (let alone implemented), we can’t count on government action alone.
We need a different approach - one that involves a grassroots strategy built on crowdsourcing and municipal-level action.
Crowdsourcing is all about massive, decentralized networks of individuals who work in synchrony to solve problems and create new ideas.
With the growing awareness of climate change and its perils, it isn’t surprising that more people are looking for avenues for direct action. They are called “citizen scientists” - people who feel responsibility to the greater good, and who are engaged in collaborative scientific work, usually under the guidance of a professional scientific establishment.
From finding child slaves in Ghana to identifying mass human rights violations in Syria; from studying plant phenomics and saving wildlife to assisting in medical imaging (most notably, fighting cancer) - crowdsourcing has become a common practice in the pursuit for the greater good.
But why municipalities? Well, partially because they are part of the problem, but more importantly - because they are a major part of the solution.
Already today, 55% of the world's population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 68% by 2050, according to the UN. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions result from how we build, manage, and live in cities. So, unless cities take direct action, the rate of urban GHG emissions is only likely to increase, and significantly.
Remember, also, the complexity of such urban environments: even a neighborhood or a small town consists of vast numbers of invisible webs of interaction among people and things. Complex systems, such as the life of a city, evolve over centuries to be stable and resilient, changing only slowly. They contain mechanisms to stabilize them when they are perturbed by external events and they will tend to revert to a familiar state (a phenomena we call resilience). So if we wish to make a broad change, such as reducing GHG emissions, these systems will resist, attempting to restore normality.
And this is exactly why we need the citizens to come up with municipal-level solutions. The citizens themselves are best positioned to not only understand the delicate complexities of their urban environments, they are also best positioned to come up with the right ideas to solve said problems.
A simple example, with origins in the C40 group of cities, is the concept of a “15-Minute City”, in which residents can meet all their daily or weekly needs by walking less than 15 minutes. This reduces the need for private cars and public transportation, and thereby reduces fuel consumption and frees up space that can be used for recreation. As the COVID-19 has led to reduced demand for office space, these spaces can be converted, without major re-building, into residential properties, reducing the cost of such homes. It also reduces air pollution with positive benefits on health and noise. Thus, a single intervention leads top-down to multiple beneficial outcomes.
It is not surprising that there are plenty of such municipal-level activities. According to a Center for Climate and Energy Solution (C2ES) report, more than 350 Climate Mayors in the U.S. have adopted the Paris Agreement goals for their cities. More than 400 U.S. cities are participating in the EV Purchasing Collaborative, and more than 125 cities both large and small have pledged to transition their communities to 100% clean energy.
What’s missing now is more projects, led by municipalities, which involve the citizens themselves. A great example is MIT’s Climate CoLab - which organizes, among many other activities, community-level contests to invite the best ideas from around the world to prevent and adapt to climate change.
The complexity of urban environments is a key part of the richness of human habitation, one of the main reasons for living in cities. In a time of disruption and of the need to reduce the impacts of climate change, the ability to deal with this complexity and to pivot to modern solutions is a major benefit. And for that to happen, citizens themselves need to take action.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
