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Cities and Climate Change: A Review Essay
Author(s) -
Cohen Joel E.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
population and development review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.836
H-Index - 96
eISSN - 1728-4457
pISSN - 0098-7921
DOI - 10.1111/padr.12259
Subject(s) - climate change , political science , geography , environmental planning , economic geography , geology , oceanography
Over half a billion city-dwellers live in coastal zones below ten meters’ elevation. Like many other New Yorkers, when Hurricane Sandy struck in 2012, I watched a dirty Atlantic Ocean pour into my home. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 and Hurricane Sandy in New York in 2012, detailed in Climate Change and Cities, were the firstand second most costly “natural” disasters in US history. They are the opening breeze of a storm of “natural” disasters that will to come to the US and the world without, and possibly even with, prompt, large-scale action on climate change. I put “natural” in quotes because the human and financial costs of Katrina and Sandy were as much artifacts as insults of nature. For example, from 2005 to 2009, the South Ferry subway station—in a high-risk flood zone of New York City—underwent a construction project that cost $530 million. The station was not flood-proofed. Sandy’s 4.3-meter (14.1-foot) storm surge damaged it severely. Both hurricanes, according to Climate Change and Cities, “disproportionately impacted social groups with lower incomes and social status, particularly ethnic minorities and women.” The chief victims were not the people who decide our climate future. Despite the costs of these and many similar recent disasters, despite the documented expectation that storms of suchmagnitudewill become increasingly frequent within decades (Lin et al. 2016; Garner et al. 2017), politics and leadership in the pocket of fossil-fuel interests have stymied adequate responses. Because cities are on the front line of climate change, some urban leadership has been enlightened. New York City has set a goal to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80 percent by 2050. The latest progress report from New York’s “80 × 50” initiative begins, “Climate change is an existential threat to our city, our country, and our planet.”1 The words “existential threat” may have been intended as political hyperbole, but they are unfortunately plausible for the more than half-billion city folk around the world who live at water’s edge.