What is called “natural land cover” - grassland, scrub, parks, allotments, public gardens, playing fields, golf courses and other ‘green’ spaces – makes up some 30% of the urban area in England. Surprisingly large parts of our cities are not concrete-grey but grass-green. Most urban rivers are now blue again and trout have returned to them. So is the water: the industrial revolution turned the rivers in our cities black and killed off most of their wildlife. Urban air is far cleaner now than it was due to better regulation, legislation and technology. In many respects the environment is much better in our towns and cities than it was fifty years ago.Ĭities are much better now at recycling and reusing the waste they create rather than dumping it in rivers or landfill: in 2019, waste recovery or reuse at the sites regulated by the Environment Agency improved to a record 74%. That is why it is the focus of a new report the Environment Agency is launching today. Successful towns and cities depend on the state of the urban environment. The state of the urban environment: good news – it’s better than it was…. In short we need to make our cities what the UN Sustainable Development Goals say they should be: “inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”. So what we want in future is not fewer cities but better ones: using resources much more efficiently, creating much less pollution for all, with more green and blue spaces to which all city-dwellers have equal access, so that our cities are a joy to live in for everyone. It is not for nothing that the word civilisation comes from the Latin for city. And they offer social, educational, cultural and other opportunities that can be hard or impossible to access in many rural environments. They produce most of the resources we need to create the cleaner, greener world we all want. They are centres of economic activity, knowledge and innovation. They put out less carbon per person than rural areas, so they are critical in tackling climate change. They are more efficient at using resources, so they are a critical ingredient in securing a sustainable economy. In praise of citiesĬities are good things. Both England’s urban environments, and our urban population, are continuing to grow. In England 80% of us now live in urban areas, and the populations of many towns and cities have doubled over the past 20 years. In 2007 the world passed a little-noticed but critical landmark: the point at which for the first time in history, more humans were living in towns and cities than in the countryside.
0 kommentar(er)
