the essentials While waiting to find an agreement on financing at COP29 in Baku, discussions are underway on the habitability of the planet.
The negotiators were still struggling to agree yesterday after a week of painful negotiations at COP29 in Baku, but they are now counting on the G20 summit in Rio – which begins tomorrow – and the imminent arrival of ministers to unblock the situation. “There remains a lot, a lot to do,” Samir Bejanov, one of the negotiators of the Azerbaijani presidency of the UN conference, admitted yesterday. This year, COP29, hosted by Azerbaijan, must conclude with a “New quantified collective objective”, which will replace from next year the previous one, which provided for rich countries to provide 100 billion dollars per year to developing countries.
Cities 2050 DR
On the sidelines of the debates, the major questions of adaptation to climate change are addressed. On Friday, the results of the HABITABLE research project were presented, which seeks to understand how communities affected by climate change define the habitability threshold of the place where they live. This project, which brought together 22 partners from 18 countries, is the largest research project on climate change and migration ever funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 program. “It is essential, because we know that the primary challenge in the fight against climate change is to guarantee that the Earth remains habitable everywhere, and for everyone,” notes François Gemenne, Co-author of the sixth IPCC report.
Habitability and the habitat of tomorrow are precisely at the heart of a fascinating book which has just been published by Éditions Eyrolles *: “ Cities 2050 » by architect Vincent Callebaut and journalist Arnaud Pagès.
Rethinking urban planning
The richly illustrated book presents ten climate actions for a desirable future, “which are revolutionizing today our modes of housing, our ways of working and living together, to build a more inclusive, supportive and environmentally friendly world. »
“Mineral, polluting metropolises, large consumers of energy resources, concentrating, by 2050, two thirds of the world population… the city contributes massively to global warming without being able to cope with its harmful effects. The breaking point has been reached, which requires a radical reinvention of our model of civilization, a paradigm shift,” explain the authors in this book-manifesto which launches avenues for reflection to help climate refugees, guarantee the food resilience of cities , transform the existing and renature the city, decarbonize mobility, focus on recycling or even reinvent cultural places. Some of the urban developments presented are already operational, others are still in the planning stage and some will remain at the concept stage, such as the spectacular biomimetic forest which was proposed to reconstruct the roof of Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral.
“Our choices today condition our climate tomorrow” conclude the authors of a book which should inspire the mayors of metropolises.
* « Cities 2050 » by Vincent Callebaut and Arnaud Pagès. Ed. Eyrolles. 216 pages, €29.90.
