most of us will either be living in an urban context or we'll we'll spend time with friends and family or visiting cities and in a sense that means that urban sustainability is is for all of us you know there's something that we can all contribute to there's something that you can find whether it's to set up a whole orange grove right now in your neighborhood or whether it's to to find another group or a collective that's taking some kind of sustainability action hello and welcome to the ecopolitics podcast season 2 global ecopolitics this is a podcast for university students tackling some of the big questions in the field of global environmental politics i'm peter andre from carleton university and my co-host for the show is ryan katzerazine from the university of ottawa ryan do you want to set up today's episode sure will do peter our podcast series as you know is about eco-politics and this season is centered on global environmental politics so it may come as a bit of a surprise to some of our listeners that this episode is looking very much at the urban scale but there's a good reason for that and our our entry point here is global cities and in today's show we're examining how the urban scale is increasingly factoring in to discussions about global ecopolitics so it wasn't that long ago just over a decade or so now that the world's urban population surpassed its rural population in a trend of urbanization which continues to this day and is expected to continue for decades to come and that as listeners might expect raises all kinds of questions for how cities can participate in global sustainability efforts and how they might have a say in the governance of environmental politics given the rise of a whole host of new uh challenges to sustainability so we're very happy to have dr harriet bulkley joining us for today's episode harriet is a professor in the department of geography at durham university in the united kingdom and at the copernicus institute for sustainable development at utrecht university in the netherlands harriet welcome to the ecopolitics podcast thanks so much it's lovely to be here with you guys uh today so harriet i'll ask the first question here and i i'll i'll just pick up where ryan left off there uh why do you think it's important to think about the role of cities in the context of global environmental politics how are they sites of global eco-politics yeah it's it does feel like a bit of a contradiction doesn't it when we think about cities as part of global politics i think it's because we're so used to thinking about cities in local terms and in a way of thinking about a kind of hierarchy of scale so that the global is on top and then we've got the national and then maybe regions or provinces underneath that and cities lying underneath that like a kind of russian doll image if you like so that the you know the global being the biggest and we borrow right down and we find the local underneath that but i i guess partly because i'm a geographer and we don't like to take things like scale and space for granted we like to kind of raise questions about what they really mean i think when we when we look more carefully at the idea of the city and indeed what it means to be living on an urban planet we soon find that that kind of hierarchical model of where cities lie as a kind of local site within global politics needs to be challenged and questioned um cities are driving our economy uh the largest cities in the world responsible for 70 of gdp or so you know as you said in your introduction the large amount of the urban population lives in cities so i think rather than thinking of cities as kind of like underneath the global we need to think of them as making up the global they're constitutive of our global experience um our global lives and and indeed of the global problems that we create whether those are environmental or political so looking at it that way we need to think of of cities as being a key element a key arena through which both global challenges are created but also where global solutions can be found so i prefer to think of them as a as an arena or a strand or a a facet of global politics rather than a site where politics derived at one scale the global is then you know implemented at the local i hope that makes some kind of sense to you well it certainly does and then thinking about cities as an arena of uh global environmental politics i wonder if you can maybe specify or categorize with the the main sustainability challenges that are related to urbanization as you see them yeah i mean it's probably not coincidental that there's a whole sustainable development goal dedicated to cities and urbanization because the challenges of sustainability are so multifaceted and highly varied actually across different kinds of urban experience i think one of the easiest ways of thinking about it are the sustainability challenges that are generated from the ways in which cities produce the economy and consume goods so we can think of cities as being a key site where greenhouse gas emissions are produced the international energy agency thinks that roughly 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions related to energy production come from the urban environment and that over the next 20 years we'll expect to see the biggest growth in energy use coming in an urban environment as well we can also think of for example cities as being key drivers behind the consumption of plastic or the consumption of meat and or you know of of other you know sand steel cement you know all of these different components material components that go into making up the urban arena but then also lead to environmental challenges not only local to cities but globally so deforestation or sand mining and so on the implications for biodiversity and also for pollution so that's a whole set of kind of sustainability challenges that cities face and then if you look at a different set of cities and you know globally we're talking about cities in the global south but we're also thinking about areas of the urban north as well where questions of poverty and a lack of infrastructure and a lack of access to basic services mean that the sustainability challenges that lie around access to resources and the means of living so these are sustainability challenges related to poverty to inequality to a lack of access to energy or water and of course also to sanitation and those sustainability challenges matter just as much really as those you know challenges that relate to the big global issues like climate change and biodiversity as you're uh speaking harriet i'm uh i'm thinking over on my shelf here i have william cronin's nature's metropolis which is an environmental history of chicago that i'm sure you're familiar with and i i remember sort of a key point that cronin makes is this idea that you know that the city doesn't stand in isolation right in his case the chicago was the center of the midwest of the united states and everything that that represented in terms of settler colonialism and then in terms of those uh the resource flows so that conceptually a city doesn't stop at its at its borders i i know this is super simplistic and i wonder if you can develop this idea a little more but but when i remember reading that more as somebody who does doesn't do city work to kind of it just expanded my idea of this the city doesn't stop at its borders it's it's about it has these long tendrils and is uh is implicated in in all of these um uh resource flows that extend well into the countryside and then these days well around the world yeah absolutely i mean that's that's a classic a classic book and a really important way of thinking about cities is that you know the the networks that they depend on the value chains through which cities needs are serviced whether that be in terms of you know just energy production where where we get our electricity from the petrol for our cars um they're different you know fuel gas or or whatever it might be there's fueling the city those have long supply chains that reach globally now as we suggested and then into the kind of complex webs of you know everything from agricultural products to uh yeah house buildings are you know generated through sand cement glass and steel and so on and these things are very you know they are very complex chains but at the end of the day we know that materials are flowing from places that are resource-rich into urban centers and not always done with the with the highest standards of sustainability in mind so i think there is this increasing interest in the ecological footprint if you like of cities and how we can start to think about that consumption side of cities as being really important but of course you know the the other side is the the wastes that cities produce and i mean my my career my my specific interest has been in thinking about how cities contribute to the climate problem um the way in which the emissions of greenhouse gases that come from cities and then end up in the atmosphere then lead to climate change and what this has meant in terms of what cities should then regard as their responsibilities in the global environmental arena when it comes to the questions of politics about what role should cities then have in relationship to national governments or international organizations in trying to take action so in a sense it sort of stretches both ways you know you've got the the links the the networks that come into the city in the way that cronin described but now i think we've got a better a better sense of how then what comes out of the city also matters globally harriet i'm going to jump in here um in a way you've set up my next question quite nicely um you've talked about how a big focus of your research has been on uh dealing with climate change and mitigating climate change uh particularly at the urban scale and so you've written a lot about low-carbon transitions and i'm wondering about the obstacles to low-carbon transition and you've spoken a little bit about this and i'm intrigued that you've you've raised a couple commodities uh or materials a couple times you've mentioned sand glass steel and cement i wonder if that's that factors into the way you would uh identify what some of the big obstacles to low-carbon transition in urban areas are but i'm curious to just hear how you respond to that what are these major obstacles at the urban scale that are making low-carbon transition particularly difficult yeah it's a fascinating question and and one that i've you know had the privilege to have some time to spend thinking about for a little while i think we can take this question if you like in in is sort of transitions 1.0 and then transitions 2.0 so we'll start with the first kind of wave of thinking about transitions and here what we're really thinking when we think about low carbon transitions is how can the city's energy system its system for fueling transportation shift away from being based on fossil fuels to being based on alternative forms of production and this requires cities to become both more efficient in the amount of energy that they use so it's about reducing energy demand and then it's about switching that energy demand to other sources um renewables solar wind and so on and of course some of that can happen within cities like you can have solar power panels in cities itself but it's also about the overall electricity supply so on one hand how and what is happening in terms of low carbon transitions in cities is related to what's happening nationally in terms of the energy system that they're part of but when it comes to thinking in the city itself about how can we reduce energy demand and switch to other sources there are a whole host of issues that really relate to kind of urban inertia and incumbency so these can come from like large-scale actors ways in which local energy companies have been used to producing energy the ways in which our roads and streetscapes are shaped around car transportation these things are difficult to change immediately but they can also come from very small scale things everyday practices ways that we're used to living our lives maybe that's the indoor thermostat you know what temperature do we sell our homes to what do we expect from office wear so we all you know do we all expect to be in a suit and tie and smart office clothes in even in the height of summer which means that we then have to have the air conditioning blasting away so large scale concrete glass and steel infrastructures that have shaped cities over time around carbon i mean our cities are part of our high carbon world right and they've been developed and orientated around the plentiful use of carbon through to our everyday practices and cultures and i've been really intrigued to think about the relationship between these sort of large-scale incumbencies and inertias and the everyday practical cultural way in which we think about fossil fuels in the city and what needs to change there so there's a whole set of things there that make low carbon transitions difficult i would have to say that when it comes to thinking about those basic materials that compose the city the things that i've been mentioning so far you know in terms of the glass steel cement etc but also things that we consume such as meat and plastics the question of the role of cities in those kind of transitions i think has only just started to be asked we're only just starting to ask ourselves what kinds of things will cities be made up of in the absence of those high carbon materials and i think we're only just really at the beginning of being able to even imagine or ask questions about how cities can get involved in those kind of transitions thanks harriet i find that uh concept of urban inertia or the various forms of inertia quite helpful i'm going to shift gears a little bit here to talk about another aspect of the literature on urban sustainability and that has to do with gentrification and there are specific or more you know specific theories of environmental gentrification taking place at the urban scale which i think would be interesting for our listeners to hear about so can you tell us a little bit about environmental gentrification and what that entails i can and possibly it's not um so far removed from the question and inertia as you might initially think but one of the things that we can see that is happening in cities in the face of these different forms of incumbency and inertia is a whole range of interventions which i like to think about in terms of being experiments forms of experimentation ways of trying to think about different kinds of approaches to everyday practice or to these large-scale infrastructures and we see a really huge range of experimentation happening in cities globally now everything from carpools to bicycle lanes to food growing food sharing clubs to new forms of low carbon housing and a whole host of different entities and the podcast isn't long enough to discuss them all but one of the issues that is emerging as these experiments and ex as these forms of experimentation and intervention are emerging in cities is what does that do socially what does it do to the to communities what does it do in terms of who is getting to have access and rights to the city and who is coming to be excluded from that so many of these different kinds of interventions but particularly around housing low carbon housing and the provision of new forms of nature what we call nature-based solutions urban green space green infrastructure in cities are leading to increasing land values and price rises in housing and in the areas where these developments are located in cities in the global north these tend to be more inner city districts but we also see the emergence of low carbon enclaves or elite housing on the edges of cities in the global south as well these are becoming quite exclusive communities and often have a detrimental impact in the suburbs or places in which they're inserted because they tend to then raise the prices of land and housing around them and therefore mean that those communities who've previously lived in these places and cities no longer can afford to to live there so that's what we mean by green gentrification we mean projects that are being done mainly through genuine attempts to introduce nature or low-carbon ways of living into cities or having this unintended consequence of uh shaping um house prices such that we exclude people but at the same time it is it is notable that some of these projects are done purely you know for this reason there are concerns about greenwashing about urban development taking a label of being green or or being low carbon in order to achieve increased price returns and to drive a housing market in particular ways or drive a land market in particular ways and these processes of gentrification are can be very socially divisive and they can also be divisive along racial lines and so what we need to be paying increasing attention to is that when we're trying to act perhaps with all good intentions for climate change we mustn't at the same time be creating injustices as we do that we know urbanization is a reality uh but as you've just explained there are you know a number of socio-ecological costs that we need to factor in to this process of urbanization both in the in the so-called global south and global north um but i think you'll you'll be familiar with a growing literature in some corners of sustainability thought um i'm thinking in particular here about eco-modernism which is essentially calling for a continuation of that kind of intensification of human activity paired with a sort of removal of humans from this quote unquote i'm using bunny quotes all over the place here but from the from the natural realm so we we should embrace urbanization we should embrace densification we should embrace intensification of human activity while simultaneously leaving nature alone harriet i'm curious to hear how you approach this as someone who tackles urban sustainability governance should we be focusing on increasing urban densification and intensification it's a really interesting perspective i mean not least in not least in the times of covit where questions about urban densification are really at the forefront one of the things about the ecological modernization approach is that it does tend to assume that all sustainability challenges can be met by greater levels of efficiency and by increasing our use of market-based instruments and government regulation in order to manage those things that can't be so well addressed directly by efficiency i think cities are not really always amenable to such sort of command and control forms of governance they are rather unruly um spontaneous difficult crazy and interesting places to be part of and i think that one of the things we have to also recognize is that multiple different forms of sustainability require different balances between kind of efficiency and resilience so one of the things of course that we're increasingly learning about is how important air fresh air nature reductions of pollution but also space is to engage with one another socialize and have a sort of an urban livability that is conducive to accommodating difference and also sustaining our our well-being are and those kinds of approaches to urban planning don't necessarily lend themselves to high density small units of living but they require the mixing together of efficient dwelling forms which are you know low in their demands on on resources such as you know the materials we've been talking about and energy over the long term with sufficient space to be mobile to get connected to one another into nature to to be kind of an active citizen on all sorts of different ways and so i think that we we are going to kind of need to move away from a sort of strictly efficiency-based principles of sustainability if we if we want cities to be good places to live enjoyable places to be inclusive places to inhabit with one another and with nature but at the same time recognizing that there is a place for efficient design the moderate use of resources in doing so but cities you know generally speaking people who live in cities use fewer resources per head of population than those who live either in suburban places or in rural areas so we do need to try and preserve that element of what semi or moderately dense urban places can give us while at the same time i think creating these kind of spaces of connection harriet many of our listeners are are really interested in these questions of justice and environmental justice so i just wonder when you talk about earlier you mentioned environmental gentrification and how the kind of densification that ryan was just talking about can lead can be socially and racially divisive you can create uh downtown cores where people can carpool and do bike lanes and urban and do the gardening and they're so attractive to live in that that housing prices go up and that has consequences for those with less means or who are structurally marginal marginalized in various ways uh so can you talk a bit about what are the what are the solutions to that what are the the planning or policy tools to intervene in markets to ensure that that kind of divisiveness uh isn't where this goes in the coming years and decades it is a very challenging question um and i think part of it stems kind of immediately from the idea that perhaps we need to be able to move away from thinking of only of land markets and privately owned land as a means through which to provide housing and some places we can see government requirements and regulations for mixed-use housing and that can include a proportion of housing that has to be affordable housing a proportion of the urban development that has to be dedicated to the provision of say schools or shops or other services as well so there are regulatory instruments that you can use to enable um different kinds of land use within within the private market but at the same time i think potentially a very unexplored element of urban planning maybe particularly in cities that have had a historically large role for the state and also for other institutions is just that quite a lot of land is owned either by public agencies or by private monopoly organizations so utilities transport companies local authorities religious organizations here in the uk the church of england for example is a very large landowner and indeed the church of england has recently published a report about what it regards its responsibility for the provision of low income but sustainable housing on its own land holdings so i think this is a bit about [Music] encouraging social and environmental responsibility amongst landholders who are intending to have their land developed in one way or another or also asking landholders whether they have the capacity to engage with this in the provision of these of public housing and public space in order to kind of enable those who cannot compete in a private land market and will never be able to compete in the private land market to have access to similar kinds of levels of sustainable housing and access to well-being as well and i know that might sound quite utopian and i know it was you know potentially a little bit socialist even but i do think that we can't expect private markets to deliver for us against a kind of a tide of of gentrification and exclusion and as a society we're going to have to decide what we want i think that is a really interesting response be and and i i totally see what you mean i'm thinking about the city of of ottawa where ryan and i both uh live and indeed there are lots of municipal spaces uh in fact the because it's the national capital the federal government owns an enormous amount of land in and around uh ottawa and much of it is um uh uh you know in trees and uh some of it's in farmland um and i i think it would be interesting to have a broad-ranging conversation among everybody who lives in this city about to you know how should these lands be used uh both from the perspective of of environmental sustainability but then also social justice moving forward um and i i think this all relates to work that you've been doing uh this program called naturevation um which examines nature-based solutions in an urban context and i wonder if you can tell us a bit about that project in general and then maybe about how that links to these questions of uh justice as well as sustainability yeah thank you yeah naturation is very close to my heart it's actually a project that i came up with with colleagues maybe about five years ago or so and maybe more now actually looking back at it and we're just about to finish a project so so yeah it's uh it's a time of looking back on it and being pleased about its achievements and also thinking about you know what we could have done differently but the project as you said is interested in this concept of nature-based solutions this term nature-based solutions has got a lot of currency in the european union it was a term developed by the european commission as an umbrella to catch what they thought were lots of different strands of related activities around green infrastructure green and blue infrastructure open green space in cities green roofs and walls things like this but also green cycle lanes and a repurposing of of public space for for recreation and other uses and they wanted to bring it all together and so the project is funded by the european commission under its sustainable cities and communities program and it involves 14 partners across europe including six municipal authorities or their community organizations in in their cities that represent those cities as well as uh universities but the dutch environmental assessment agency and and other actors as well um and the purpose of the project has been trying to assess what nature-based solutions can do for sustainable development goals the idea about nature-based solutions is that they can generate benefits across multiple sustainability issues areas at once i think that's why i've been interested in them i think we don't really have enough time to address climate change you know on monday biodiversity on tuesday food on wednesday air pollution on thursday the week isn't long enough right to fit all this sustainable challenges in and nature-based solutions are have the promise of being able to address more than one agenda at once so by developing say sustainable urban drainage systems in cities the idea is that you can address the impacts of climate change you can create space for people to use for recreation and well-being you can create places which can foster biodiversity they can also act to clean pollutants from water so you might address four different sustainability challenges at once and we've been trying to develop tools to assess whether this is the case we've also been looking at what are the opportunities for nature-based solutions to become implemented in cities but also these questions are the barriers and challenges that we discussed earlier with low carbon transitions and now we're thinking about how can they be mainstreamed as well so what will it take in terms of governance in terms of finance in terms of cultural change in the urban development industry to start to think of building with nature rather than you know just start to think about first if you like rather than let's think about building a concrete grey roof first and then think about why we should make it a green roof what will it take for the first solution to be thought of as a green roof and somebody to need to make the case why it shouldn't be so that for me is a kind of definition of mainstreaming and that's some of the questions that we're kind of grappling with now we're at the end of the project and harriet can i just uh ask you again sort of on the the the social justice question around nature-based solutions how do you see um this if you will the social justice co-benefits of nature-based solutions uh playing out yeah when it comes to the social justice co-benefits of nature-based solutions i think some of the important points about nature-based solutions and maybe things which differ from other kind of sustainability interventions in cities is that we see a whole host of different kinds of organizations and social groups being involved in urban nature so a really wide range of different kinds of actors from you know indigenous groups in both melbourne and winnipeg where we've done some research through to know women's groups youth groups groups of elderly people with dementia being included and involved in nature-based solutions work in cities so i think in terms of processes inclusion and involvement in the actual work of nature-based solutions we can see that there's some really interesting social justice dimensions to them that perhaps you don't get say with car clubs or solar panels right at the same time there are a lot of concerns that as nature-based solutions become more and more attractive not only because they provide immunity value benefits for health and benefits for well-being but also because they actually like stop your house from being flooded or reduce your urban heat pressure in the summer that they are going to have this gentrifying effect that we discussed earlier that they are going to be pushing house prices up and we've done various different parts of work in the in the project to look at this um colleagues at the university of barcelona autonomous university of barcelona have led on our work examining what the social justice struggles over nature-based solutions have been what their politics are who is advocating for them we do find that large urban developers can just sort of do some hand waving about nature-based solutions and and use them as a means of of increasing property values without really giving back much in terms of the functions or the services or the benefits of nature to at a both a public level and even to the residents who end up buying those kinds of apartments and land but at the same time we also find that you know genuine struggles around nature-based solutions can improve access to nature for different kinds of groups in the community as well so like most things with sustainability their politics aren't set from the outset they're always places of contestation and struggle and it does depend a lot on the particular actors and the particular moments through which those those politics are realized there are things we can do from a design perspective from a governance perspective from an implementation perspective if you like to reduce their gentrification approach and one of the things that our friendly economists at utrecht university who we who we collaborate with also in this project have shown is that multiple smaller scale nature-based solutions intervene intervening and distributed at different points in the city have a lower gentrifying effect than singular large-scale nature-based solutions which is what tends to dominate the market so one thing that governments could do or landowners could do is if large-scale urban developments with nature-based solutions are being planned is to think about how those could be complemented with other kinds of nature-based solutions that other partners might be able to bring to the table in cities and in doing that you can share the benefits more broadly you can create more corridors for wildlife you can have a better effect on cooling the city overall you can share the benefits both publicly and privately harriet i'm going to jump in here and ask a question i hadn't planned to ask about urban food production and i think we all know there's a lot of excitement uh some might call it hype about things like uh vertical farming or you know other forms of uh food production at the at the urban scale and peter and i have been talking a lot about this about whether you know there are some you know what are the prospects and limitations of food production in cities and so i'm curious to hear your thoughts what are the prospects for this what's the potential or at the same time what are maybe some of the limiting factors involved here yeah it's a fascinating area and it does have as you say a lot of hype around it i think you know we can come back to this question of of land and of gentrification i mean land in cities is rare and if urban food production is competing for you know for value with land that you know might be better off used for housing for those who haven't got access to shelter i think we need to start asking ourselves questions about whether we're doing the right thing at the same time i think it's really interesting to think about can we integrate food production into the existing urban fabric so that it's not something that is requiring of more space but actually sort of weaves in to the space that we already have so some of the things we can see happening here is rather than planting parks with ornamental trees should we start to plant them with productive trees i know in copenhagen they've been doing this in urban parks with the idea that it should be in a kind of an abundance that those who might not otherwise be able to have access to fruit would have access to it so that's one kind of you know very sort of simple story but the the idea behind it is to think of food production is taking place in our cities as they are now rather than kind of reserving space for food production so for me it's always going to be about you know why are we doing it are we doing it to kind of grow you know some small herbs for the high-end restaurant in the end you know the west end of london or are we doing it because it fits into the city as it is at the moment that it can be an easy transition that it's about abundance and accessibility to foods that some people wouldn't otherwise have i do think that there is more potential there than we've tapped into so far but i think it's unlikely to be you know if it might be too unkind unlikely to be led by hipsters possibly more park rangers that's a interesting uh reflection and uh thank you for indulging my my uh question out of left field there um i i do want to bring it back to some of the transnational relationships that we have seen and that you've written about between cities um to bring it back to the to the global uh scale so i'm just curious to hear from you you know what kinds what are these transnational relationships and networks that have been developed by cities and more importantly are these you know effective are they uh a way forward in terms of truly fostering more sustainable forms of development at the urban scale yeah transnational city networks is definitely one of my favorite things i was really fortunate to stumble across this phenomena of cities organizing amongst themselves and across boundaries towards the end of my phd and i think we can safely say that it did make my career so i have a particular soft spot for them of course but i think one of the fascinating things about transnational city networks is both their durability so we saw the first transnational city networks being formed as early as 1989 and then through the 1990s they grew quite significantly and those same networks are still around today so as a former political organization there's a kind of means of cities acting globally on these kind of key sustainability challenges and particularly on climate change we've really seen you know a durable set of institutions established now for 30 years but at the same time they have changed enormously over this period so if they first of all started off with this idea of sharing best practice really between quite independent entities i think they now many of them now really think of working and moving collectively they think of themselves as as collective actors in the international arena and you have some high profile networks like c40 which is a network of the big global cities uh but you also have you know more smaller networks uh they there's a network funded by the ellen macarthur foundation on cities and the circular economy which isn't is a smaller group of cities but is equally doing some really interesting things so they come in all shapes and sizes and they involve a whole host of different kinds of cities and i think they are important in terms of sharing knowledge and learning and best practice but probably for me they're most important for two other reasons the first is that they give political confidence to cities to think about acting on global sustainability issues where they might by themselves not feel able to do so and the second is that they really have been enormously effective in mobilizing resources there's just an enormous amount of resources that are being directed to urban sustainability initiatives that without these networks in place would not have taken place so the combination between the learning the resourcing and the political confidence is i think their sort of magic set of ingredients which has made this such a kind of robust set of institutions in global politics over these three decades this is really a fascinating harriet and and we're getting close to the end but i just wonder given what you've just been saying uh where i've seen these networks of cities operating is in the realm of food policy that's an area that both ryan and i work in and it is quite amazing to see the lessons and the the partnerships that are emerging across cities from you know johannesburg and uh montpellier in france working with the toronto uh urban food activists and so on can you give us one or two examples where you've really seen these transnational networks lead to interesting innovative projects or change on the ground yeah sure i mean i think one of the most interesting networks for me to have followed over this period of time has been the c-40 network i think it started with just a very few cities and has grown extensively but one of the things i think has been most interesting about it is how it has now turned from a primary focus uh you know 10 years ago or so on setting targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions in cities globally it's quite in some sense it's quite straightforward so now being much more concerned with this question of the consumption of cities and how their approach to consumption particularly cities in the global north what its implications are for the overall use of resources globally and so we can see um cities now entering into kind of partnerships with construction industries to think about how can you reduce the footprint of materials that are being used to generate new urban development cities working on also on their foods footprints as you described us there about food networks also really interesting um and also this you know increasing in interest on questions of justice and solidarity so both cities thinking about questions of justice within their own city but also about solidarity with other cities globally and what it will mean for some cities to have to take more action than others in order to kind of address questions of global inequality and so seeing some of those kind of agendas being set by an organization like c40 and then turning up in sort of policies and actions on the ground in a variety of cities globally i think is really interesting i think another um set of networks you know where really there's a huge growth at the moment is in in a whole set of networks that i'm partially involved with which are trying to set targets for biodiversity and cities have traditionally not really looked at this global policy issue but we have a new new kid on the block called cities with nature which is a partnership between iucn the nature conservancy and wwf but led by italy and they now i think have about 180 members who are trying to start thinking about what it will mean for cities to undertake action under the convention of on biodiversity and to try and think about what cities can do to to both sort of contribute to conserving and restoring nature but also to to living well or thriving with nature and i think this is just a really new fascinating development and if they are successful in bringing cities into the conventional biodiversity which is what they're trying to do at the moment while at the same time being successful in enabling cities on the ground to to really see the impact and implications they have for biodiversity globally i think we'll we'll really witness a fascinating set of global politics around this issue in the next decade well for me this has been a really inspiring conversation harriet um and you know we started with the russian doll image uh that he said is probably not the right way to think about politics where you know the the there's the global level and then below that the states interact and below them the regions and provinces and and then below that uh the cities but this example that you're providing of these networks really shows that there that the interactions are happening across these various scales and uh that in some ways we even need to flip that uh doll inside out so thank you so much thank you for joining us on the podcast today well thank you very much for having me and i hope your listeners have enjoyed our conversation thank you harriet uh that's been fantastic talking with you and i just want to add that uh while we still have one or two more episodes to record for season two this is actually our final episode scheduled for season two so just want to quickly say thank you to everyone for making this podcast come together thank you to all of our guests yourself included harriet's thank you to our production team a big thank you to our funders at carleton university and the university of ottawa and a huge thank you to our listeners a reminder the podcast is made available under a creative commons license 2.0 so please share it but we just ask that you provide appropriate attribution and follow us on twitter at ecopolitics p that's ecopolitics with a capital p at the end and get in touch our website is at ecopoliticspodcast.com the global ecopolitics podcast is produced by nicole bedford support with transcription and captioning is provided by kika mueller and adam gibbert helps us with artistic design and digital support thanks to all our listeners till we meet again in season three you
