Cities and climate changes:

Human settlements and shelter for all

Seetha KODAGODA

Since 1985, the United Nations has been celebrating ‘World Habitat Day’ on the first Monday of October, of each year to focus attention on the state of human settlements and the basic right to adequate shelter for all has been celebrated on several themes by the UN habitat. ‘World Habitat Day’ this year will be celebrated on the theme of ‘Cities and Climate Changes’. The United Nations has chosen this theme to raise awareness on quality of human settlements.

Hence climate changes have directly resulted in environmental changes in various countries and we can see a real movement of a environmental sense. So, I am willing to focus on this paper to the point of view ‘Human face of the urban environment.’

There is little doubt that a rapidly growing share of the world’s population is living in urban areas. Urban areas are thus both consumers and producers and have become the engines of economic development. And yet they also contribute to the pollution of the natural environment. Cities have their own special problems that have produced new environmental phenomena and behaviour. Mountains of solid waste, rivers that burn and air quality that can lead to brain damage and loss of human intelligence.

Urban dwellings

We have also learned that these problems have disproportionately large impacts on the urban poor. Housing policies that force the poor into un-served squatter settlements keep people poor by denying them the opportunity to use their physical environment. The result is that only 40 percent of urban dwellings are connected to sewers, inadequate water supply forces the poor to pay higher prices for water, of 10 to 15 litres what middle income householders pay per litre of portable water. A lack of effective sanitation and waste disposal polluters, shallow aquifers, which other poor residents use as water resources. Middle and upper income groups are able to afford solutions to these problems, the poor are forced with these additional burdens.

Let me try to identify the critical features of the human face of the urban environment, why is the challenge of the urban environment a human problem? Because the manner in which people have organized themselves, has important consequences for environmental resources. As increasingly shares of national populations are found in urban areas, their consumption patterns become more significant.

When we speak of the vulnerability of urban areas to environmental disasters, it is not because Sri Lanka cities receive a higher rainfall than the countryside and thus are susceptible to flooding. It is rather that concentrations of people in urban areas may have constructed infrastructure to manage run off that cannot be maintained, thus leading to flooding of the banks of drainage canals. This so-called ‘natural disaster.’ Therefore, may be “natural only in the sense that it is a commonly understood part of the human experience.”

Natural resources

Are cities sustainable? The question itself must be broken down. First are cities living within reasonable resource limits? We know, for example that there are cities and towns in India consuming dangerously unsustainable quantities of natural resources. The question is not whether cities are sustainable but rather “what needs to be done to improve their sustainabilities?” We must look at examples of best practice from around the world to learn what policies and approaches have allowed some cities to be successful in managing environmental resources.

Finally, crucial to all these questions is the issue of urban environmental governance. Does pre-occupation with environmental degradation imply a new set of challenges for urban environment? How will mayor and other public officials deal with the environmental problems their cities are now facing?

These questions suggest that we are at the beginning of an existing intellectual journey on the subject of the world’s urban environment. The improving the quality of life for the urban residents, the frontier and be proactive in radically changing the ways things are done. This will involve broadening the dialogue and cooperation involved in the design, preparation and appraisal of urban environmental projects, increasing the institution’s allocation of staff to the urban environmental sector and providing increased assistance to countries in establishing National Environmental Action Plans.

Human agendas

To work with local and national governments, NGOs and other professional groups to establish explicit objectives for improved performance and to develop clear indications of success for urban environmental projects.

The world has come to understand that global and local, national and regional, rural and urban eco-system and environmental conditions are all connected, that all of us are downwind and upstream from one another. The urban environmental agenda used to be considered largely a set of local problems. Today, the world community is consumed with revisiting and renegotiating the human agendas. Increasingly these agendas require critical attentions to the human and environmental conditions in cities and towns of all sizes and poverty, urban poverty is inextricably part of the problems.

Key points of the environmental management in Sri Lanka:

*Promote geographically balanced settlement structures

*Manage supply and demands for water is any effective manner

* Effective and environmentally sound transportation systems

* Mechanisms to prepare and implement local environmental plans and local agenda 21 initiatives

*Urban population

*Disasters and rebuild settlements

The writer is a Senior Manager (NHDA), Town Planner (ITPSL), Chartered Real Estate Consultant (IREV)