The global urban population will double by 2050 to 6.3 billion people and the total urban area will triple between 2000 and 2030, according to a report tabled during ‘Cities for Life’, a city and sub-national biodiversity summit, organised at the sidelines of the Conference of Parties (COP11) to the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD).
The report titled ‘Cities and Biodiversity Outlook’, prepared by the Stockholm Resilience Centre and released by chief minister N Kiran Kumar Reddy, said a major part of this urban expansion would be concentrated in small and medium sized cities throughout the world. In such cities, the population would double faster - from 2.84 billion in 2010 to 4.9 billion in 2030. There were only around 3.5 billion urban dwellers worldwide in 2010.
This accelerated pace of growth means a threat to biodiversity and efforts at its conservation. The report, which focuses on action and policy towards sustainability, seeks to provide a link between urbanisation, biodiversity and ecosystem services.
The report states that India’s population is currently 30 per cent urban and is expected to become 50 per cent urban by 2040. This will have significant implications for the environment, ecology and sustainability. India already has three of the world’s 10 largest cities - Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata - as well as three of the worlds’s 10 fasted growing cities - Surat, Ghaziabad and Faridabad.
“The urban expansion will draw heavily on natural resources and will often consume agricultural land, with knock-on effects on biodiversity and ecosystem services elsewhere. Most future urban expansion will occur in areas of low economic and human capacity which will constrain the protection of biodivesrity and management of ecosystem services,” the report said.
Urbansiation rates are highest in those regions where the capacity to inform policy is absent and where there are generally under resourced and poorly capacitated urban governance arrangements. The report highlights how urban planners, policy-makers, scientists and citizens alike can help to reduce the loss of biodiversity.
Urbanisation is both a challenge and an opportunity to manage the ecosystem services globally, the report said. With a functioning urban ecosystem, human health and well-being can be improved and a rich biodiversity can exist in cities. It can also help contribute to climate change mitigation while increasing the biodiversity of urban food systems can enhance food and nutrition security.