THERE
is no "end-state" to sustainable urbanisation, a visiting senior
policy consultant from Arup said yesterday.
Debra Lam, Arup representative, said that
sustainable cities don't happen overnight but are the product of a
"multi-generation timeframe".
Arup is a global consultancy firm acting as
one of the strategic partners to 40 major cities (C40) that have banded
together to combat climate change.
"When we talk about sustainable
urbanisation, we have to be realistic. This is not going to happen overnight.
It's not going to happen next week and it's not going to happen next
year," Debra Lam said yesterday at the 29th Conference of Asean Federation
of Engineering Organisations (CAFEO).
"We need to forget about the short-term
small gain for the long-term, more sustainable solution," she added during
her presentation at a hotel in Gadong.
While noting that cities were becoming more
economically efficient and posted increases in their gross domestic product
(GDP), she said that this came at the cost of environmental degradation.
This was due to the traditional method of
"resource-inefficient" growth, which she said was "centred on
perceived unlimited and heavily subsidised public goods causing catastrophic
environmental damage".
Though only representing two per cent of the
world's land mass, cities contributed 75 per cent of the world's greenhouse gas
emissions.
Meanwhile, buildings produced half of these
emissions, and urban sprawl and congestion were major drivers of energy use in
cities.
"In the traditional way that we have
developed business as usual where we think that public good is just free and we
don't really think of resources as finite, and we just aim to consume, it means
that our carbon (output) is just growing," she said.
With the need to reduce this carbon output
universally recognised, many cities were trying to break away from the
traditional mould towards sustainable urbanisation.
However, Lam stressed that this development
had no end-state that was defined by a target such as in GDP or carbon
reduction.
"It's very much a process. You hope to
become more sustainable as you continue to develop and grow. And it's not
mutually exclusive to socio-economic development and can very much go
hand-in-hand but in order go through this time and process," she said.
"You don't arrive there and then, not
have to worry about it again. It's very much a process that takes time, takes
leadership and takes stakeholders working together," she told The Brunei
Times.
For this to happen, the parties have to first
prioritise the areas that they needed to address "at the reality of the
situation versus the perception".
"And then combining it and making a list
of priorities in terms of what are we able to do now, and what are we able to
do in the future".
"Ultimately, we need to take a step back
and think about what is necessary for sustainable usage," she said.
Lam explained that this needed to happen from
both a top-down and bottom-up approach.
From the bottom-up, stakeholders needed to be
engaged to come together "to do something about sustainable
urbanisation".
This was where the private sector can help to
change the business model and financial mechanisms that are associated with
business decisions, while the civil society can add in the local input and put
the ideas into context.
Professional organisations such as engineers
can then come in to drive the wide range of strategies around the built
environment.
From the top-down, the leaders, ministers or
mayor of the city were the ones to drive the people to ensure those actions
materialised, she said, adding that the integrated approach needed to be
devised before sustainable urbanisation can take place.
"It cannot be driven by one set of
actors."
UBAIDILLAH MASLI
BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN
The Brunei Times
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