Urban Approach to Planetary Boundaries
* Article: An urban approach to planetary boundaries. By Hoornweg D., Hosseini M., Kennedy C., Behdadi A. Ambio. 2016 Sep;45(5):567-80. doi: 10.1007/s13280-016-0764-y. Epub 2016 Feb 20.
URL = https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26897006 download]
Abstract
"The achievement of global sustainable development goals subject to planetary boundaries will mostly be determined by cities as they drive cultures, economies, material use, and waste generation. Locally relevant, applied and quantitative methodologies are critical to capture the complexity of urban infrastructure systems, global inter-connections, and to monitor local and global progress toward sustainability. An urban monitoring (and communications) tool is presented here illustrating that a city-based approach to sustainable development is possible. Following efforts to define and quantify safe planetary boundaries in areas such as climate change, biosphere integrity, and freshwater use, this paper modifies the methodology to propose boundaries from a city's perspective. Socio-economic boundaries, or targets, largely derived from the Sustainable Development Goals are added to bio-physical boundaries. Issues such as data availability, city priorities, and ease of implementation are considered. The framework is trialed for Toronto, Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Mumbai, and Dakar, as well as aggregated for the world's larger cities. The methodology provides an important tool for cities to play a more fulsome and active role in global sustainable development."
Discussion
James Gien Wong:
"Urban Planetary Boundaries (UPB) are a set of biophysical and socio-economic indicators developed by Daniel Hoornweg et al. that apply at the city scale, and are a variant of the Planetary Boundaries (PB) developed by Johan Rockstrom et al. The UPB concept differs from the PB in three respects. First, they apply at a metro rather than a global scale; second, they embed only 7 biophysical indicators instead of 9; and third, they add 7 socio-economic indicators. The resulting 14 indicators were designed to map to the UN SDGs. UPB are relevant to make doughnut economics actionable. Over 70% of climate impacts originate from cities (C40, 2019) so urban metrics are a critical part of a rapid transition that will lead to doughnut economics (Raworth, 2012). As cosmo localization will take place at the community and metro scale, UPB are a key indicator of a rapid commons transition."