Sustaining our consumption levels will require the resources of 2.3 planets by 2050.
That’s according to the World Economic Forum.
By that year 1.3-billion people in Africa will be living in cities compared with the 395-million that did so by 2010. This mass urbanisation, coupled with climate change, could spell disaster for the continent.
Like-minded practitioners in urban studies, however, hope there are solutions and these were presented recently at the Rise Africa conference.
According to Kecia Rust, head of Affordable Housing Finance in Africa (CAHF), one of the most critical investments for a sustainable city is affordable housing.
“Given urbanisation and slow GDP growth in Africa, and slums mushrooming, plus Covid-19, what has come into clear focus is that we have to do much more to address affordable housing challenges, with far fewer resources.”
One solution, she said, is building more affordable green (eco-friendly and sustainable) houses on a mass scale.
“We need to be more efficient in what we do. A starting point is asking what the price of the cheapest newly built house built by the private sector is in your country,” she said.
The cheapest option on the continent could then be replicated on a larger scale across several countries, thus bringing down the cost of each unit.
She added that greening a house is thought to be a luxury option for the wealthy, but if done to scale it reduces the long-term cost of living.
According to Samantha Naidu, from the Treasury in SA, expanding investment in poor infrastructure is the most urgent and crucial solution in the face of the climate crisis and urbanisation.
By 2030 weather-related and other disasters will cost cities $314bn (about R5-trillion), which is more than SA’s GDP, she said.
“Inequality, unemployment, poverty and declining growth. These are all relevant in municipal spaces and it’s about how cities can grapple with this and respond to their service delivery mandates,” she said, adding: “Over the last few years these challenges have been further compounded by bad credit ratings that municipalities have, the pandemic and issues around financing and sustainability.”
Within this context, climate change poses a threat as the last straw.
“We have seen Cape Town’s crisis around water. eThekwini’s floods have had a major impact and this should influence how cities make investments. The urban poor bear the brunt. In some of these large centres there is declining growth and it has been exacerbated by uneven spatial form, and we have been speaking to this for years. But the scale of change is not adequate. We need to expand investment in poor infrastructure,” she said.
Another solution lies in education.
In March, a group of young African professionals and students contemplated various futures for how the circular economy might play out in Africa.
The circular economy is a model of production and consumption which involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing, reducing and recycling existing materials and products for as long as possible.
One of their ideas is that environmental awareness and practical ways in which to stimulate a circular economy should be built into education from the early childhood development phase.
That way children will grow up with it and it will become a natural part of what they think and experience, rather than being a marginal “cause” they may buy into when they’re older and it’s too late.
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