GLOBAL URBAN DEVELOPMENT, ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY, AND CLIMATE CHANGE
Global Urban Development (GUD) is a worldwide non-profit organization founded in 2001, consisting of a rapidly growing network of more than 300 dynamic and well-known urban leaders from many different countries representing a wide range of occupations and institutions. We conduct education, research, and action to promote policy ideas that help generate more equitable urban planning and more sustainable urban development throughout the world. To further these goals, we publish annually the state-of-the-art Global Urban Development Magazine on our website, www.globalurban.org, and we engage in projects in partnership with a wide variety of organizations, especially the United Nations (UN).
Global Urban Development was founded on three basic ideas. The first idea was to acknowledge that for the first time in all of human history, the world is now becoming an urban world. According to the UN, more than half of the people in the world are now living in cities and towns as of 2007. Therefore, the majority of the world’s population is now urbanized. This occurrence is all the more remarkable because in 1950 only one-third of the world’s population was urbanized, and yet by the end of this century, two-thirds of the world’s population will be urbanized. Many people are alarmed by this trend, seeing it as a major problem. GUD, on the other hand, believes that everyone should adapt to changing times by working together to solve the urban challenges rather than turning our backs on them or trying to reverse these powerful urbanizing trends. Since urban economic activity is more productive and innovative and produces both more jobs and higher incomes, we advocate using rapidly increasing urbanization as a resource for improving the standard of living and the quality of life both for urban and rural residents alike.
The second idea is that all people and communities have much more in common than the differences between us. Thus we do not divide the world into irreconcilable differences, such as the standard division between “developed” countries and “developing” countries. GUD includes every person and community equally in our policy debates and initiatives. In that sense we are not like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, for example, because the OECD limits both its organizational membership and its policy focus primarily to relatively developed countries. Rather GUD is like the UN in that we include everyone. This explains why GUD works very closely with the UN on several different initiatives, including the Community Productivity Project (CPP), in partnership with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN-HABITAT), and Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI), designed to make significant progress in researching and identifying new and better ways to reach the UN’s Millennium Development Goals related to environmental sustainability, poverty reduction, gender equality, public health, and global development partnerships.
The third idea is that Global Urban Development stands for practical action to accomplish visionary goals through broadly inclusive and equitable solutions. We do not seek to divide people into greater conflict between “winners and losers” or “haves and have-nots.” Our approach is to unite people through education and consensus-building in order to identify and implement “win-win” solutions where all can successfully become winners and where every person, family, and community can achieve long-term peace and prosperity, health and happiness. We are organized into highly participatory and inclusive program committees based on value-oriented themes such as Metropolitan Economic Strategy, Facing the Environmental Challenge, Treating People and Communities as Assets, Building Gender Equality in Urban Life, Celebrating Our Urban Heritage, Global Urban Development, and Improving Public Health.
None of these committees is more vital than Facing the Environmental Challenge. On February 2, 2007 in Paris, France, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), incorporating the consensus opinion of 2,500 scientists from more than 130 countries, issued an extremely alarming report warning of dire consequences in terms of terrible droughts, dangerously hot temperatures, violent storms, disastrous flooding, and a dramatic rise in sea levels that will literally put much of the earth’s current land mass under water, including the very spot where we are meeting here today. Hundreds of millions of people and many other living species of animals and plants will face life-threatening emergencies within the 21st century unless there is a drastic reduction in the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions into the earth’s atmosphere during the next few decades. These emissions, which are entirely the consequence of human action, can only be reduced by human actions that include resource conservation, use of renewable energy, and a major change in the current methods of production and consumption that continue to accelerate the excessive utilization of the world’s resources and the exponential rise in the burning of fossil fuels. On April 6, 2007, in Brussels, Belgium, the UN's IPCC issued the second part of its report, which strongly reinforced and expanded the drastic conclusions of the first report two months earlier.
On May 4, 2007 in Bangkok, Thailand, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published the third part of the report, which dramatically warns that if worldwide carbon emissions are not substantially reduced by 2020, global warming will set in motion irreversible natural processes such as the melting of the ice shields in Greenland and the over-acidification of the oceans. According to the IPCC report, greenhouse gas emissions can be succcesfully reduced through the use of currently available technologies to encourage much more widespread energy conservation and promote extensive increases in energy efficiency.
The world is now facing the greatest threat to the future of human life on our planet that we have ever faced since human life first began long ago. Surely we cannot stand idly by and permit such an unspeakable tragedy to occur. The only potential solution is for human beings to drastically change their lifestyles – all of the ways in which each and every one of us produces and consumes the world’s physical resources. Key to such a major shift is that it cannot be accomplished piecemeal. Unless everyone changes in every corner of the world, we do not have any hope of saving the lives of our children and grandchildren. What used to be a somewhat controversial political and arcane policy issue is fast transforming into a moral imperative for all human beings everywhere. At Global Urban Development we are literally praying that our three core ideas are the right approach: embrace urbanization but make it sustainable; include everyone and everyplace because we are truly all in the same boat, which in this case is planet earth; and search for “win-win” solutions where everyone can participate in a positive, cooperative spirit and in which everyone will benefit from the outcome. GUD’s goal is to point the way toward making the earth’s environment genuinely sustainable and supportive of human, animal, and plant life, not only to survive, but to actually thrive, better than ever before, throughout world during the coming decades and hopefully for many centuries to come.