Building resilience to climate change

Global temperatures are expected to rise at least 2.5°C on average above pre-industrial levels this century, far above the Paris Agreement goals¹. Cities can expect to feel even more heat.

With people crammed together, urban areas experience an environmental amplifier effect because of air and noise pollution, congestion and the heat “island” effect. Extreme weather events, such as this year’s searing heatwaves in Delhi and deadly floods in Dubai, stretch cities’ infrastructure beyond breaking point.

The result is that urban areas act as early warning systems of climate change. The good news is that city planners and builders are responding to the alarm signals these systems are sounding by harnessing innovative clean technologies and smart solutions to tackle urban challenges. These innovations should, in turn, provide a template for the rest of the world to address its environmental problems.

To have meaningful impact, these solutions require infrastructure investment, presenting opportunities for new markets to grow. Carbon dioxide removal (CDR), a method of removing and storing CO₂ from the atmosphere, is becoming one viable solution, and potentially a commercially attractive one too. Some investors believe the carbon removal business will create an industry the size of the oil and gas sector.

While some scientists and policymakers warn that CDR is no substitute for reducing emissions in the first place, it is nonetheless increasingly seen as vital to net zero goals. The UN Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), for instance, now recognizes that the deployment of CDR is critical and 'unavoidable' to fight climate change. The IPCC says CDR can achieve and sustain net negative greenhouse gas emissions in the long term and is required to limit warming to 1.5⁰C.

Other solutions to address environmental problems in urban areas include less industrialised and tech-heavy methods of solving urban ecological and resource challenges. These centre on harnessing nature’s ecosystem services in cities – such as pollination, provisioning of clean air, food and fresh water and flood prevention.

Such adaptation methods are known as Nature-based solutions (NbS), designed to protect and restore nature, address environmental and societal problems and increase resilience at the same time.

The use of timber in cities, in particular, is becoming more popular as new technologies like cross-laminated timber (CLT) and changes in building codes allow architects to swap concrete for wood even in skyscrapers². It is also a growing market – the global CLT industry is forecast to expand at nearly 15 per cent on a compound annual basis by the end of this decade from the current USD1.1 billion³.

The UN estimates that investing in nature-related targets – such as nature restoration, the efficient use of resources and reducing water and air pollution – will help plug an estimated USD7.4 trillion gap in natural capital by 2030 and have the potential to deliver more than 20 times the return on investment⁴.