Urban Planning
This report stems from growing concern about the threat of extreme heat in urban settings and its adverse impacts on health. The team made use of the TIP—that is, the targeted, integrated, and prepared—framework, introduced in the recent "Healthy Cities" report (Lee et al. 2023), to help World Bank task teams explore pathways toward urban heat investments. This study gathered city responses and investigated existing World Bank initiatives to gain an understanding of what had already been done and the potential for future action.
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The built environment sector is critical to achieving a nature-positive future, as it is responsible for nearly 30% of biodiversity loss globally, 50% of global raw materials extraction, 40% of waste streams, and 40% of CO2 emissions.
By 2025, the construction industry is predicted to generate 2.2 billion tons of waste annually. Of this, approximately 77 million tonnes (35%) end up in landfills each year.
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Cities were at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic due to the concentration of affected populations and economic activities that needed to be revived to support global recovery. While cities offer strong economic and social benefits due to density, proximity, and global connectivity, the pandemic had a tremendous impact on their vital functions. It resulted in lost lives and livelihoods and deepened economic and social divides. Furthermore, the pandemic exacerbated many existing environmental challenges in cities.
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This document unpacks the elements of a city that places the economics and ethics of care at the centre. The framework addresses a range of dimensions of city life from the perspective of women. Safetipin’s work over the past decade has focused on designing and planning safer and more inclusive spaces, with a focus on mobility for women, using a data-driven approach. This approach has generated robust datasets that have resulted in interventions in cities across India and other cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
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This technical note discusses methods for using these data in combination with locally meaningful jurisdictional boundaries to calculate local measurements of indicators on several themes—including access to urban amenities, air quality, biodiversity, flooding, climate change mitigation, heat, and land protection and restoration—relevant to urban decision-makers, researchers, and other stakeholders.
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This Urban Flood Risk Handbook: Assessing Risk and Identifying Interventions is a roadmap for conducting an urban flood risk assessment in any city in the world. It includes practical guidance for a flood risk assessment project, covering the key hazard and risk modeling stages as well as the evaluation of different flood-mitigating infrastructure intervention options and management of the project. The Handbook has been developed based on lessons learned from implementing urban flood risk assessments around the world in a diversity of contexts.
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The IUCN Urban Alliance, a broad coalition of IUCN constituents concerned with the urban dimensions of nature conservation, has unveiled a new knowledge product for measuring the ecological performance of cities: the IUCN Urban Nature Indexes (UNI). Comprising six themes with five indicator topics nested within each theme, the UNI is intended to help policymakers, stakeholders and local communities understand their impacts on nature, set science-based targets for improvement, and monitor progress using science-based measures.
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Open spaces are essential resources for public health and the environment: they provide places for recreation, cultural enrichment, learning, exercise, and relaxation, as well as crucial support for wildlife and habitat, clean air and water, and local economies.
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The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 created a temporary crisis of confidence in the future of cities. However, a broad consensus is that urbanization remains a powerful twenty-first century mega-trend; and that well-planned towns and cities remain central to the sustainable development trajectory. There is a sense of optimism that the crisis may provide us with the opportunity to build back differently, more inclusively, greener and safer.
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In order to respond to the challenges and growing demand of counterparts, partners and populations to better integrate nature in cities, AFD Group has developed this technical guide "Biodiversity in Cities". In urban areas, biodiversity makes it possible to act simultaneously on health and well-being of inhabitants, on employment, on resilience to natural risks and on climate. It thus complements actions in the water management, agriculture and fisheries sectors.