C40
An
enormous flood of people is moving from the countryside to the cities. About half of the
world's population now lives in cities
and it's predicted that this will rise to 75% by 2050.
In 2006
the C40 organisation was set
up, representing forty cities worldwide, which is working to moderate
the problems this migration is causing.
The first
question is : 'Why do people want to live in cities ?' The main reason
is that they believe that this is where they will find the best
opportunities and a higher standard of living.
Is this a 'good thing' or a 'bad thing' ? It
depends. The population of Hong Kong is very concentrated. This means
that people can easily reach facilities like shops, work and
healthcare; so they spend only 5% of their income on transportation.
Houston in the U.S. is spread over such a wide area that people there
spend 20% on transportation, creating high pollution and wasting large
areas of land - a very inefficient model.
Another difficulty is that the gap between the rich
and the poor is very clearly visible in the cities. In Mumbai in India,
rich people are keen to keep cheap labour close by, living in dreadful
slums. When slum-dwellers were offered land on the outskirts of the
city to move them away from the centre, they sold the land and moved
back to the slums to be nearer to their work. Houston and Mumbai are
both C40 cities.
People living in the countryside often have very
large families; this means that older people will have children to help
them in their old age. In cities, the birth rate generally falls; large
families are expensive to support and family-planning advice is easier
to find. Cities generally have higher energy efficiency, thus reducing
waste and CO2 production. On the other hand, many cities are near the
coast which means that they are more likely to be flooded as sea levels
rise due to global warming.
C40 was set up in London to help to tackle
climate change. The next C40 Summit Meeting will be held in Sao Paolo
in Brazil in June 2011.