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GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT OUTLOOK FOR YOUTH IN ASIA AND THE PACIFIC Cooperating Cities for Sustainability


International city-level collaboration can be another effective approach of enhancing urban resilience and sustainability, through, for example, sharing experience and technology among cities. Such collaboration can encourage adaptation and mitigation action and policies on climate change through facilitating urban greening, enhancing social capital and reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts of cities, while sustaining their economic activity. To promote international collaboration among cities, city-level indicators, measurements of a city’s economy or environmental sustainability, can be a useful tool. By comparing the values of different indicators, the similarities and differences between cities can be understood, allowing for more efficient and effective communication between cities for policy-making (Uchiyama et al.2015). In addition to facilitating international collaboration, management of cities can be improved by using the municipal-level indicators. For example, the City Sustainability Index (Mori et al. 2015; Shen et al. 2011), which is made up of several indicators including carbon dioxide emissions, gross regional product per person, and measurements of income or wealth distribution among residents (the Gini coefficient), is often used to evaluate the status and trends of cities’ environments, economy, and societal characteristics and thus guide policy making. Other information that can be used in the evaluation of cities includes aggregated community-level census information and micro-level information on their environmental and socio-economic status collected by monitoring activities with citizens.


4.4 Adopting sustainable solutions


“To counteract the socioeconomic drivers leading to environmental degradation, an economic transformation that is particularly based on improved energy and transportation systems and smart green growth for urban areas is urgently needed.” UNEP (2016).


The continuing rapid growth of the Asia-Pacific region’s economy and the anticipated affluence of approximately 3 billion additional people in the coming years will put tremendous pressure on its limited natural resources. The region’s future competitiveness will depend heavily on progress made in the trasition to a low-carbon future and on how efficiently the region’s natural resources are used. Climate change will also have far-reaching implications for Asia and the Pacific. Sustainable pathways include dramatically increasing energy efficiency, reducing reliance on fossil fuels by supporting the uptake of renewable energy, adopting strategic approaches to urbanization and eco-friendly building design, relying more on mass transit and railways for long-distance transport and changing lifestyles to alleviate pressures on finite natural resources.


Renewable energy – it’s real and reliable


In 2015, the world burned fuels emitting 32.3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (IEA 2017). Of this, 67 per cent was for electricity generation. Even though on a per kilogram basis it is not as environmentally harmful as carbon monoxide, methane or nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide is largely responsible for climate change and related disaster events simply because of it abundance in the atmosphere – more than 80 per cent of annual greenhouse gas emissions are of carbon dioxide.


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