Energy is like the blood of the city, it must be pumped around continuously to keep the body working. We need water to shower in the morning, we need fibres to access our car sharing platform and commute to work, and we need electricity to power the office so we can get our work done when we get there.
And the need to solve the problem of how to keep that power flowing in cities without harming the environment is more pressing than ever, especially given the rise of so-called “megacities”, with populations of 10 million or more.
“Urbanisation is the unstoppable phenomenon of this century,” says Angelo Facchini, a senior researcher at Enel Foundation – a non-profit research body and strategic studies centre funded by the energy multinational Enel. “People from rural areas are being attracted by the quality of life cities have to offer. One of the main drivers to quality of life is energy. It causes mobility and is the main reason for increased demand of basic resources and services, like electricity and water.”
Chris Kennedy, Iain Stewart and Angelo Facchini are three of the outstanding academics and experts involved in a recent study led by the University of Toronto and the Enel Foundation that analysed the energy and material flows of 27 of the world’s megacities (cities with a population of 10 million or more) – a number set to rise to 40 by 2030. The researchers presented their key findings at the recent Ecology at the Interface conference in Rome in September.
These megacities account for 6.7% of the world’s population, produce about 14% of the globe’s GDP, use around 10% of its electricity and gas, and are responsible for producing just over 12% of the world’s waste. Energy is powering them but we need to understand the consequences – and the opportunities to ensure sustainable development, says Kennedy.
As city populations increase they not only put a strain on energy supplies, but they also lead to environmental stresses, notably CO2 emissions. According to the World Bank, building inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable cities requires intensive policy coordination and investment choices. Utilities will play more and more a leading role in the future, as stated in a recent document on development of smart grid infrastructures, both as enabler for the diffusion of electric vehicles, and in developing countries, where “modernising the distribution grid promises to benefit the operation of electric distribution utilities in many and various ways. These benefits include improved operational efficiency (reduced losses, lower energy consumption, and so on), reduced electrical demand during peak load periods”.
“There is a need to make cities more sustainable and reshape infrastructures,” Facchini says. “The current situation is complicated in terms of air pollution and the energy it takes to get people from one point to another. Without a transition to urban sustainability, the pressure on the environment will only increase.”
A key finding of the megacities study, points out Stewart, is that cities such as New York and Los Angeles that have greater floor space per capita generally have higher consumption. It could be one of the reasons why New York, for instance, consumes more energy than Tokyo despite having 12 million fewer inhabitants.
Facchini is speaking ahead of the publication of the book Cities in the 21st Century, being released by Routledge early next year, in which he has co-authored a section called “Living at the edge of chaos: a complex systems view of cities”.
He says that, as well as planning a lower carbon future for developed urban areas such as New York and Tokyo, the world’s urban planners will increasingly need to address the rise of people living in slums or informal settlements often found on the outskirts of cities in Africa, Asia and South America. As city populations boom so will the number of poor people moving from rural areas to access jobs and services. That means a higher number of people living in and around megacities without proper access to resources.
Kennedy says that a key concept in the megacities analyses – and a term increasingly used when talking about sustainability – is “urban metabolism”, where a city is seen as analogous to an organism, eating up resources such as water and fuel and releasing waste and pollution. A city with low metabolism such as Lagos produces less, leaving its inhabitants poorer; a city with high metabolism such as London produces more but is of course hungrier for resources.
“Understanding how cities consume energy and how materials flow is a fundamental aspect in assessing the pressure of an urban system on the environment while defining sustainable solutions. Both in terms of consumption and in terms of emissions,” says Facchini.
And it seems that, just as a body denied food will be sluggish, so a city denied key resources such as electricity and water will have low “metabolic flow”.
“Our research pointed out that lack of access to basic resources is a main factor in underdevelopment and low metabolic flows in megacities,” Stewart explains. “The fact that cities like Lagos, Mumbai and Kolkata show consumption rates ten to twenty times smaller [than those of] developed cities is a direct consequence of lacking resources”.
And like a body excretes waste, the city produces waste and pollution. Dealing with this will be a huge challenge for all megacities in the future, particularly in developing countries. “On the other side, lack of basic infrastructures for energy, water, waste collection and sanitation poses its own severe challenges to quality of life. It leads to unsustainable and inefficient resource consumption,” say the researchers.
According to the research, utilities will play a critical role in developing megacities, by ensuring all citizens, and particularly those living in areas of low metabolic flows, have access to basic services.
Renata Mele, head of sustainable development and innovation research at the Enel Foundation, who co-edited the book Cities in the 21st Century, says megacities will need initiatives that provide solutions to those who can’t afford electricity. Failing to provide people with such solutions will mean some continue to live off-grid – and resort to tactics such as energy theft.
She provides the example of Brazil, where Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro are notable megacities, and where Ampla, a subsidiary of Enel, has set up the programme Consciência Ampla, a series of sustainability and cultural projects to improve citizens’ quality of life by fostering efficient energy use (by example through educational activities and by the use solar water pumps in households) and making electricity affordable. A notable project is the EcoAmpla scheme, where poorer people who connect legally to the grid can exchange recyclable waste in return for a reduction in their electricity bills. Since 2008 EcoAmpla has reached 150,000 people, collecting some 4,800 tons of waste and granting reductions of €280,000.
Utilities, Facchini suggests, will have a key role in promoting social inclusion in megacities by spreading access to energy. Policy makers should work closely with utilities in order to develop new policies and design and implement technical solutions to reduce inefficiencies and environmental stresses while ensuring homogenous development.
Programmes such as EcoAmpla, concludes Mele, are a good example of what she calls “fruitful cooperations” between utility and city dweller to make urban life more sustainable – but they are just the start. In the future, both she and Facchini agree, cities – especially megacities – will need utilities who are “committed to the cause” of urban planning for sustainability.
Content on this page is paid for and produced to a brief agreed with Enel, sponsor of the energy access hub on the Guardian Global Development Professionals Network.
