Name Do Luong Huong Giang

Class AE4b

Assignment Draft

In recent years, urbanisation, which is the global trend, has increased rapidly,

especially in the developing countries. The percentage of people living in cities about

over fifty per cent of the world’s population and the UN-Habitat (2009, the p.xxii cited in

UTS, 2015) calculates that in 2050, the citizen’s proportion account for seventy per

cent. And the urbanisation has led to an increase in people’s demands, including the

use of machines,manufacturing in factories and vehicles. Because of green house gas

(GHG) emissions, both rural and urban areas have to deal with global warming. The

essay demonstrates about the impacts of climate change on people’s life in urban and

town, as well as evaluate three plans to be able to address the negative impacts.

It is easy to recognise that global warming causes some adverse effects. First of all,

climate change is likely to have a huge impact on water supplies (UTS 2015, p.14).

Quality, distribution and accumulated deficiencies are what the poor need to face,

however, climate change makes these become more serious. The difficulty will increase

for cities located in drier areas ( Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change 2007 cited

in UTS 2015). Second, climate change leads to an effect of the sea level rise on the

coastle cities. For example, when the global become warmer, ice sheets in North Pole

and Antarctica will melt. As a result, large amounts of water will flow into the oceans,

which leads to rising sea levels. From that, the seawater will encroach upon the

mainland causing tsunamis and adverse effects on people and property.

 To reduce the negative effects of global warming, the mitigation strategies are

necessary. Firstly, it is essential to cut down the number of green house gas(GHG)

emissions. By decrease the smog from private vehicles, three-million people can be

recued (Wikipedia 2020). Secondly, according to Broadbent,G (2011), reducing GHG

emissions can be started by changing the charges of car-relates, such as pay-as-you

drive insurance, increase parking fees during rush hour in areas where traffic jams are

common and road congestion charges.

Besides mitigation strategies, adaptation plans to modify the impacts of climate

change on the life in urban and town are also important. Adaptation means anticipating

the adverse effects of climate change and taking appropriate action to prevent or

minimise the damage they can cause, or taking advantage of opportunities that may

arise. It has been shown that well planned, early adaptation action saves money and

lives later (European Commission). And the first point of adaptation plans is land use.

According to Elisabeth Braw (October 2013), the green options of the Copenhagen city

is building green roofs and green streets which will keep storm water, sidewalks allow

water to penetrate. Leonardsen’s team images that liberation space surrounding its

coastline by lowering the local lake level . They use this space to build a park in that

they have playgrounds and pathways. In case they face superstorms, the water will be

stored in the lake and place nearby a park. Besides that from the Guardian (2012), to

adapting to climate change, people have to change their behaviors such as reduce

using water, farmers planting many differents kind of crops, more household and

business buy insurance. Moreover, according to IPCC, three elements of vulnerable

climate change are exposure to hazards, sensitive to those hazards and adaptability
with those hazards. Therefore, adaptation solutions can reduce the vulnerability- for

example, decreasing the sensitivity or constructing adaptive ability, as well as allowing

the people can receive positive effects from the climate change such as planting new

crops in the areas which unsuitable before.

The second point of adaptation strategies is called “Grey infrastructure”. The planner

of Copenhagen cities design the road in order to hold the water from storms or flooding

and then directly release it to the harbour. Leonarden explained that in 2050,

Copenhagen would be known as a city with smaller streets, but the huge number of

trees, and this point also make sure that flooding would be slowed down and easier to

be predicted, so people could prepare before the storm comes. Not only storms,

flooding and the rising sea level, but also heatwaves, they are all bad effects of climate

change. (Elisabeth Braw 2013). Some place also have good adaptation strategies, for

example, in Europe, the build the house or aparment with adapting building codes to

future climate conditions and hard weather events. They also build the flood defences

and raise the levels of dykes (European Commission).

In conclusion, in order to cope with the effects of climate change, a combination of

adaptation and mitigation is essential. However, large problems of us are not enough

information on costs and benefits of adaptation (IPCC, 2007). Because mitigation can

not be suitable for long-term so we need to mitigate from now, it can make finding

adaptation measures easier.

References
https://public.wmo.int/en/bulletin/key-ipcc-conclusions-climate-change-impacts-and-

adaptations#:~:text=Impacts%20of%20climate%20change%20are%20occurring
%20now&text=Nevertheless%2C%20the%20conclusion%20is%20that,anthropogenic%20emissions

%20of%20greenhouse%20gases.

https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/adaptation_en#:~:text=Examples%20of%20adaptation

%20measures%20include,species%20and%20forestry%20practices%20less