Somini Sengupta: Hot Cities on a Hotter Planet

Somini Sengupta.

At a time when the majority of the world’s population is urban, climate change presents grave new risks for the world’s cities and forces city folks to figure out how to survive.

Somini Sengupta, international climate reporter for The New York Times, considers the scale of the problem and the different ways urban populations around the world are rapidly recalibrating to address and counter climate change.

Read the news about this Melbourne Design Week event - “Somini Sengupta: Hot Cities on a Hotter Planet.”

Cities change how much it rains and where storms hit

Urban development changes storm patterns and rainfall amounts, two new papers suggest.

The research highlights the need for urban planning and infrastructure design that considers how the landscape will affect the weather.

In two separate papers, teams led by Dev Niyogi, Indiana state climatologist and professor in the agronomy and earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences departments at Purdue University, studied storm patterns over the coastal megacity of Mumbai, India, and the mountainous city of San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina, to determine how urban development affected storms in those regions.

The researchers expected to see that Mumbai’s added heat and buildings significantly disrupted storms. But they expected to see little impact in San Miguel de Tucumán since the terrain around the city is rugged, which likely makes the storms turbulent before they reach the city.

Read the Futurity story by Brian Wallheimer from Purdue University - “Cities change how much it rains and where storms hit.”

Farmers on the front line of climate change

Not long after leaving school, I followed the well-trodden path of many farm girls and boys; packing my bags and joining a shearing team. Through 40-plus degree days of skirting fleeces and grinding blades (hot tip, this is not a good way to cool down) on the edge of the pastoral country during a Western Australian summer as a 17-year-old, I had no idea the suffocating heat was rapidly becoming a defining feature of our changing climate. Fast forward more than a decade and as I write this, in Crookwell, NSW it’s 38 degrees and a local sheep farmer has come in from an early morning start – forced to muster his lambs before the inescapable heat stresses livestock, and farmers. Shaking his head as the sweat drips down, he wonders how to adjust to temperatures 14 degrees above average.

Farmers, standing at the front line.

For most urban dwellers, summer means time by the pool and flocking to the nearest shopping centre when the heat becomes too much. For Australian farmers, summer means something very different. 

Read Verity Morgan-Schmidt’s story on The Border Mail - “Farmers on the front line of climate change.”

Water bills headed 'same way as energy' as population gains, climate change bite

Urban water users face water bills that will increase by half within a decade and continue to climb without "substantial" reform as rising population and climate change add stress to ageing networks, Infrastructure Australia said in a new report.

People could be paying a lot more for water in the future. 

The future surge will build on a steady run-up in costs in recent years even as total water consumption has stagnated since the 1980s, with consumers responding to calls for more thrifty use.

The paper, Reforming Urban Water, also argues poor planning processes led to an $11 billion splurge on desalination plants that – with the exception of Perth – have largely gone unused and precluded cheaper short-term measures.

Victoria earlier this year ruled out a second plant after its multi-billion dollar Wonthaggi was left on standby since its completion five years ago.

Read Peter Hannam’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Water bills headed 'same way as energy' as population gains, climate change bite.”