William Solecki

Cities lead the way in climate-change action

Scientists should do the research to help mayors prepare for a warming world, say Cynthia Rosenzweig, William Solecki, Stephen A. Hammer and Shagun Mehrotra.

Mitigating New York City's heat island: integrating stakeholder perspectives and scientific evaluation.

This study of New York City, New Yorks, heat island and its potential mitigation was structured around research questions developed by project stakeholders working with a multidisciplinary team of researchers. Meteorological, remotely-sensed, and spatial data on the urban environment were brought together to understand multiple dimensions of New York Citys heat island and the feasibility of mitigation strategies, including urban forestry, green roofs, and high-albedo surfaces. Heat island mitigation was simulated with the fifth-generation Pennsylvania State University-NCAR Mesoscale Model (MM5). Results compare the possible effectiveness of mitigation strategies at reducing urban air temperature in six New York City neighborhoods and for New York City as a whole. Throughout the city, the most effective temperature-reduction strategy is to maximize the amount of vegetation, with a combination of tree planting and green roofs. This lowered simulated citywide surface urban air temperature by 0.4°C on avera...

Climate Change and the Global Financial Crisis: A Case of Double Exposure

Despite widespread and growing public recognition of the linkages between environmental change and economic activities, geographic research efforts to date have paid only limited attention to the connections and interactions between climate change and globalization. As a consequence, critical linkages, feedbacks, and synergies between these two processes often go unnoticed. In this article, we draw on the framework of double exposure to motivate new research on the connections between climate change and globalization. The double exposure framework provides a generalized approach for analysis of the interactions between global environmental and economic changes, paying particular attention to the ways that the two interacting processes spread risk and vulnerability over both space and time. Focusing on the linkages between climate change and the ongoing financial crisis and using the case example of Californias Central Valley, this article shows how application of the double exposure framework can provide new insights into social vulnerabilities and can inform efforts to respond and adapt to both processes. The article also illustrates how the double exposure framework can be used to inform and promote place-specific, geographic analyses of the complex interactions between large-scale environmental and economic shifts.

It's Time for an Urbanization Science

Today, urban areas generate more than 90% of the global economy, are home to more than 50% of the world population, consume more than 65% of the world’s energy; and emit 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions.1 The science and policy communities increasingly recognize that cities, urban areas, and the underlying urbanization process are at the center of global climate change and sustainability challenges. Policymakers need facts, empirical evidence, and theories on how to plan and manage cities and urbanization during the contemporary era of rapid change and environmental uncertainty. by William Solecki, Karen C. Seto, and Peter J. Marcotullio

Critical Surveys Edited by STEPHEN ROPER

Leichenko, R. M. and Solecki, W. D. (2005) Exporting the American dream: the globalization of suburban consumption landscapes, Regional Studies 39 , 241–253. This paper examines how cultural, economic and political aspects of globalization interact with processes of urbanization in less developed country (LDC) cities to create new landscapes of housing consumption. Drawing evidence from the current literature, the paper demonstrates that globalization processes influence the housing preferences and housing consumption decisions of a small yet growing, middle‐income segment of LDC urban residents. These changes lead to patterns of urban resource use akin to those associated with suburbanization and suburban sprawl in more developed countries (MDC), particularly the USA. In effect, these changes amount to the manifest export of the American Dream – the ideal of homeownership of a single‐family house in a suburban area – to LDC cities. A critical element of this process explored in the paper is how this suburban ideal is set down within each city context. This placement is presented as the result of global‐, national‐ and local‐level drivers. The emergence of consumption landscapes raises critical questions about the environmental and social sustainability of globalization, as LDC residents increasingly emulate the highly resource‐consumptive, energy‐intensive and exclusionary lifestyles currently practised by MDC suburbanites.

Theorizing Land-Cover and Land-Use Change: The Case of the Florida Everglades and Its Degradation

Abstract This paper possesses two related objectives. The first is to unite the bid-rent model of von Thünen and urban theorists with historical analysis in the interest of providing a theoretical approach to the comprehension of regional land-cover and land-use change. The second objective is to deploy the theoretical approach in an attempt to account for a specific change process, namely loss of wetlands in South Florida. Recently, the Annals of the Association of American Geographers published a paper addressing this issue (Meindl, Alderman, and Waylen 2002). Meindl, Alderman, and Waylen describe the impact of claims making on efforts to drain and sell land in South Florida during a critical period in the early 20th century. The present paper is put forward, in part, to provide additional context. In particular, we identify claims making and the development discourse it legitimated as part of a complex evolution in the regions socionature, and the regimes governing land-cover and land-use change that led to wetlands reclamation. To explain these regime shifts, we criticize conventional bid-rent theory and develop a model integrating urban and agricultural land use whose structure is affected by development. We then deploy this model to the Everglades case, using historical narrative and remotely sensed land-cover data. We conclude the paper calling for integrated theoretical approaches in attempts to comprehend land-cover and land-use change and associated environmental problems.

Towards transformative adaptation in cities: The IPCC's Fifth Assessment

This paper considers the very large differences in adaptive capacity among the world’s urban centres. It then discusses how risk levels may change for a range of climatic drivers of impacts in the near term (2030–2040) and the long term (2080–2100) with a 2°C and a 4°C warming for Dar es Salaam, Durban, London and New York City. The paper is drawn directly from Chapter 8 of Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, the IPCC Working Group II contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report. It includes the complete text of this chapter’s Executive Summary. The paper highlights the limits to what adaptation can do to protect urban areas and their economies and populations without the needed global agreement and action on mitigation; this is the case even for cities with high adaptive capacities. It ends with a discussion of transformative adaptation and where learning on how to achieve this needs to come from.

Understanding Human–Landscape Interactions in the “Anthropocene”

This article summarizes the primary outcomes of an interdisciplinary workshop in 2010, sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation, focused on developing key questions and integrative themes for advancing the science of human–landscape systems. The workshop was a response to a grand challenge identified recently by the U.S. National Research Council (2010a)—“How will Earth’s surface evolve in the “Anthropocene?”—suggesting that new theories and methodological approaches are needed to tackle increasingly complex human–landscape interactions in the new era. A new science of human–landscape systems recognizes the interdependence of hydro-geomorphological, ecological, and human processes and functions. Advances within a range of disciplines spanning the physical, biological, and social sciences are therefore needed to contribute toward interdisciplinary research that lies at the heart of the science. Four integrative research themes were identified—thresholds/tipping points, time scales and time lags, spatial scales and boundaries, and feedback loops—serving as potential focal points around which theory can be built for human–landscape systems. Implementing the integrative themes requires that the research communities: (1) establish common metrics to describe and quantify human, biological, and geomorphological systems; (2) develop new ways to integrate diverse data and methods; and (3) focus on synthesis, generalization, and meta-analyses, as individual case studies continue to accumulate. Challenges to meeting these needs center on effective communication and collaboration across diverse disciplines spanning the natural and social scientific divide. Creating venues and mechanisms for sustained focused interdisciplinary collaborations, such as synthesis centers, becomes extraordinarily important for advancing the science.

Urban environmental challenges and climate change action in New York City

Climate change presents cities with significant challenges such as adaptation to dynamic climate risks and protection of critical infrastructure systems and residents’ livelihoods. City governments and inhabitants must continually respond to a variety of urban environmental risks. Understanding how cities have begun to extend these experiences to the context of climate change adaptation as well as mitigation is crucial for the development and identification of climate action best practices. The focus of this paper will be to document and explore how the city of New York has begun to define and implement a set of climate actions over the past half decade. These actions are presented within a discussion of past and future climate risks and vulnerabilities, and of climate and sustainability programmes that the city government has developed recently. Even as a mature, mega-city in a developed country, lessons from the New York City experience can be transferred to a variety of other urban contexts.

Boost resilience of small and mid-sized cities

Smaller settlements are growing faster than megacities — and they need more protection from extreme events, write Joern Birkmann and colleagues.