Recently in Planning / Land Use Category

Urban sustainability is the challenge of the century as more of the world's population becomes urbanized (50 percent in 2008, 60 percent by 2030), at an ever-faster rate. Global climate change has been caused in large part by the burning of fossil fuels to generate energy, materials and food for metro areas. Yet urban culture also constitutes a powerful response capability by which to cope with the diminishing socio-economic options forced by climate change, especially in megacities, metro areas of more than 10 million people.

Upon this tableau, I am collaborating with the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, in conjunction with other UN agencies (United Nations Environment Program, UN Development Program, UN Habitat and UN Center for Regional Development) and the Shanghai World Expo Bureau on a sourcebook for sustainable urban management in developing nation megacities.

 

The sourcebook will consider sustainability advantages to urbanization along with disadvantages. It will cover broad topics including greening the urban economy, effective management, as well as solution sectors (land use and planning, water, buildings, transportation, information and communications technologies). Case studies will be provided to illustrate how solutions have already overcome a host of urgent challenges, or how they may soon be able to help do so.

 

With the acute rise of urbanization in developing nations, megacities will increase in both number and economic-environmental influence. There are between 12 and 15 developing nation megacities (cities of 10 million population in their metropolitan areas), with 19 developing nation cities in total expected to reach megacity status by 2025. 

 

During the next ten years, according to the McKinsey Global Institute (pdf), 90 percent of urban population growth will take place in developing countries. In India, for example, cities are forecast to garner 85 percent or the nation's total tax revenue (up from current level of 80 percent), which will be the primary source for financing economic development on a national scale. Seventy percent of all new jobs are projected to be created in India's cities by 2030, though cities are expected by that date to represent only 40 percent of the nation's total population.  

In terms of impacting climate change, consider that the cities of Asia alone are expected to contribute more than half the global greenhouse gas emissions between now and 2027.

 

Besides the threats and risks that megacity growth poses to global humanity and regional resources, trends in developing nation megacities will also strongly define emerging economic opportunities for large-scale low-carbon and resource-efficient technologies, services and strategic approaches. Whether in Delhi or Mexico City, megacities are devising more effective methods of integrated sustainability management using everything from social networks and crowdsourcing, to paticipatory budgeting and comprehensive green planning.

 

Cities are the most powerful economic engines in the world for advances in information and communications technologies, health care, education and energy systems. These combined capacities have provided urban areas with anywhere from 55 percent (developing nations) to 85 percent (developed nations) of total national income, significantly surpassing per-capita income averages, and trending even more upward during the next two decades of hyper-urban growth.

 

Megacities and urbanization, in other words, should be the cause for global concern that needs to be tempered with concerted strategy, actions and ultimately, hope for humanity. 

 

The complete United Nations study is expected to be released on 1 May 2011, the first anniversary of the opening of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo-which has a theme of "Better city, Better life."

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active consultancy based in San Anselmo, California. He is a Fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute and author of How Green is Your City?: The SustainLane US City Rankings.

Black tarballs and goopy oil are washing up on the summery white sands of Florida's beaches. The Gulf oil gusher has reached a pivotal moment, not unlike Cleveland's Cuyahoga River catching on fire during the summer of 1969.

The burning Cuyahoga River became a symbol for a national ecological and industrial system so out of kilter anyone living at the time could see things were really screwed up. News reports and even songs, including Randy Newman's "Burn On," about the flaming chemical-contaminated water blazed into the public consciousness--I remember as a six year old in Chicago hearing talk about the burning river over in Cleveland.  

Partially because of the talismanic Cuyahoga, the United States was forced to enact clean water and clean air legislation that helped reform poor corporate and government management practices. Earth Day was also launched within a year and a potent social moment was hatched. The Nixon Administration supported the passage of new clean water and clean air legislation in Congress, and President Nixon even proposed in late 1969 a new oversight agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, for independent industry oversight, with stiff penalties for those that violated regulations. One of the first cities the agency "went after" when formed in 1970 was Cleveland, precisely because of its burning river.

We are facing the nation's worst environmental disaster, and it is becoming visceral.  Models from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predict that oil from the Gulf spill will travel from off Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida's panhandle, toward South Florida, the Florida Keys and the Atlantic Seaboard by summer (NOAA model image below). So don't be surprised to see more shots of tarballs, oily birds, turtles and greasy human feet. If you live in the Southeast or vacation there, expect to smell, see and feel them in real life.

"The smell is the worst thing," said NBC correspondent Anne Thompson Friday.  "Until you smell it, you haven't experienced it. It is so vile and it gets in your nose and your throat and your lungs and just stays there. The consistency is like a combination of molasses and chocolate syrup and it just stinks."

As Pensacola's famed white beaches are besieged by toxic fumes, tar balls and oil blobs, the first real audience reviews from average Americans are coming in, and they're not pretty. 

In the world's consciousness, it's one thing to have oil wash up on a coastal Louisiana "swamp"--though scientists and the fishing industry know that marine life, along with many bird species, depend on estuary wetlands for their existence.  It's quite another thing to prohibit Americans from enjoying their summer vacation at the beach, which endangers the Southeast's tourism and fishing industries, along with the service industries that rely on summer visitors for all or much of their livelihood.

What will happen next?  I wrote on early April 29 that the BP oil crisis could become larger in magnitude than the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. How much worse can this get? No one knows, but eventually government policy, consumer habits, technology adoption, media, and even real estate markets will be changed as a result of the BP oil gusher.

Stopping the oil from spouting into the ocean is of course priority number one.  Sunday some 10,000 barrels of oil a day were being captured by BP, with cameras showing more oil still spewing. 

Here are urgent needs that should be prioritized:

1. The Obama Administration must conduct a detailed risk assessment of the regional tourism industry, the fishing industry and regional services (haircuts, restaurants, plumbers, etc.)  that could be impacted by this tragedy. The geographic focus should include the Gulf Coast states, south Florida, Atlantic Coast (north Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina) and the open Atlantic. By my rough estimate below,  there could be an economic impact to the Southeast US economy of more than $52-78 billion, based on the following:

·         Gulf Coast commercial fish products $6.5 billion Total--$2-3 billion impact?

·         Gulf Coast and Southeast Coast share of $42 billion Total US recreational fishing equipment expenditures: $2 billion impact?

·         Gulf Coast $100 billion tourism industry Total --$30-50 billion impact?

·         Florida beach-related tourism $42 billion Total--$10 billion impact? 

·         Florida recreational fishing $5.4 billion Total--$1-2 billion impact? 

·         Florida commercial fishing: $5.5 billion Total--$1-2 billion impact?

·         Florida boating industry $18 billion Total:--$3-4 billion impact?

·         Georgia coastal tourism $2 billion Total--$.5 billion impact?

·         South Carolina coastal tourism Total $6.5 billion--$1-2 billion impact?

·         North Carolina coastal tourism Total $4 billion (estimate)--$1 billion impact?

·         Regional services associated with tourism?

·         Impact on Ecosystem services (wetlands that clean water, vegetation including mangroves that provide flood and hurricane buffer zones)--incalculable?

·         Heath Care costs for workers, and residents impact by air and water quality?

Such "full cost" accounting is now more than ever necessary to examine complete economic, climate, environmental and societal impacts.   

2. US subsidies to oil companies--some $15 to $35 billion a year--need to be curtailed, and transferred to Gulf oil clean-up funds and Gulf economic restoration, and also redirected to fund alternative transportation fuel and technology research and deployment.  
3. The Mineral Management Service agency needs to go. MMS's relationship to the oil industry is so incestuous it will be impossible to reform.  "Obviously, we're all part of the oil industry," one MMS official said to investigators who were looking into reports of graft, porn and drugs shared by MMS staff and oil officials. The feds need to create a completely independent oil and gas regulatory agency, similar to the EPA, but with greater power as energy is essential to the daily functioning of the overall economy. The EPA has already said that it might have a hard time penalizing BP because it is such as large supplier of fuel to the US military, including being the top supplier of military jet fuel.
4. Higher-vehicle mileage and alternative technologies need to gain much faster traction. We need more miles per gallon (beyond current goals) for conventional engines, more plug-in hybrids, and the development of more biofuel-burning engines that don't use food as a fuel source.
5. Can this finally be the time in our history when "recreational" cars and other joy-ride vrrooom vrrooms--at least oil and gas burning machines--stop being cool? That goes for jet skiis and race cars. After all, besides demanding all that gasoline, oil and oil-derived products (tires, hoses, asphalt roads), these machines are causing global climate change, not to mention regional and global air pollution, and water pollution from runoff.  Measures should be instituted so individuals using these machines purely for pleasure make the connection between their hobbies and the perilous quest for harder-to-justify oil.
6. The United States needs to consider less-polluting domestically produced transitional fossil fuels for transportation, including compressed natural gas. Recent discoveries have shown a large supply of domestic natural gas can--if used for transportation--can offset some of the need for risky deepwater drilling (though natural gas drilling has been shown to pollute some local water supplies, and such activities need to be monitored closely).
7. Here's the most obvious yet least discussed solution in public or the media.  Urban and community planning needs to be instituted that will reduce automobile dependence.  Cars use close to half of the oil used in the United States, with much of that use resulting from our national migration to poorly planned communities, which has been condoned and abetted by national, state and local policy. Yes, plug-in hybrids and electric cars will one day replace many of the gas-burning cars on the road today, but until then (15-20 years?)  transportation including cars and trucks will account for about 70% of oil used in the country, primarily in suburban/ exurban communities that lack public non-automotive choices for commuting to jobs, schools or for shopping, entertainment and errands.

It is time to face the sobering truth.

We, or at least all of us that drive or use goods delivered by or that contain oil, are the root of the BP Gulf oil crisis. Until, we change the way our communities are planned, operated and valued, we will unfortunately encounter with numbing frequency disasters related to oil that may be even more horrific than BP's gusher.

Denial and guilt, combined with entrenched financial interests (Big Oil and the Auto industry), have been powerful forces chilling media discussion about the need for less-oil dependent community planning--walkable neighborhoods with mixed uses and good public transit.

It's time to step up the post-oil conversation while implementing full-cost risk and reparation analyses. The Obama Administration and our nation have their work cut out for them:  there is a need to clean up not just beaches, Gulf communities and wetlands, but also the dank bureaucratic swamps of institutional corruption.

The burning Cuyahoga River demonstrated that a crisis truly can present numerous opportunities. Let's link cause and effect to powerful solutions by taking bold national and local actions that will have lasting impact, long beyond the narrowly framed BP Gulf oil disaster news-of-the-day.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.

Big surprise for me today, as the formidable Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has seconded my analysis of how communities need to prepare for changing conditions related to the economy, climate and resource availability.

Kaid Benfield, NRDC's director of Smart Growth reviewed my recent posts about the urgent need for urban resilience planning in a NRDC blog post today titled "What Cities Should do to Become More Resilient (and It's Not What they are Doing Currently)."  Benfield writes, "NRDC has chosen sustainable communities as one of its strategic priorities for the next five years. Karlenzig's advice seems right on target as we further refine that agenda."

That advice was recently provided for Green Flow readers here in a two-part series. Part 1 was "Urban Resilience Planning for Dummies" and Part 2 was "Urban Resilience Planning for Dummies: Failing the Milk Test."

These posts were teasers for a standalone publication I wrote that is coming out very soon from the Post Carbon Institute (PCI), titled, "The Death of Sprawl: Designing Urban Resilience for the 21st Century Climate and Resource Crises."

A shorter version of "The Death of Sprawl" will also appear in the Post Carbon Reader, which is being published by The University of California Press and Watershed Media this summer, alongside writings from PCI's other 27 fellows.

I'm honored to be profiled and credited by author Kaid Benfield, who besides his affiliation with NRDC, is one of the top thinkers, doers and writers in the urban planning realm.

A few months back when I published an excerpt from a case study on Victorville, California-- where sprawled finished luxury houses were demolished last year after the exurban foreclosure meltdown--I learned that Benfield was one of the first people to write about the incident in his NRDC blog, which includes graphic video footage of what may be a watershed moment in the end of exurbia.

Besides being ever-prescient, Benfield's "almost daily" blogging provides readers a detailed perspective of what's right, what's wrong and what needs to be drastically improved in the way our communities have been planned, developed and operated.

Thanks, Kaid.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.


 

Last post I covered some guiding principles for urban resilience planning in the face of climate change and diminishing resources (especially fresh water and oil). Considering these guidelines, what aspect of U.S. metro development stands out as the most ill-advised and risky? Short answer: exurban sprawl.

If the "Great Recession" taught us anything, it is that allowing the unrestrained sprawl of energy-inefficient communities and infrastructure is a now-bankrupt economic development strategy and constitutes a recipe for continued disaster on every level.

"Shy away from fringe places in the exurbs and places with long car commutes or where getting a quart of milk takes a 15-minute drive," was the warning the Urban Land Institute and PricewaterhouseCoopers gave institutional and commercial real estate investors in their Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2010 report.

I make the further case that the exurban economic model is an outright anachronism in the Post Carbon Institute's Post Carbon Reader, which comes out this summer from the University of California Press and Watershed Media.

Much of US "economic growth" in the 1990s and early 2000s was based on the roaring engine of exurban investment speculation with gas at historic record low prices. That bubble popped on the spike of $4 a gallon; we now are paying the piper with abandoned tract developments, foreclosed strip malls and countless miles of roads to nowhere. Gas prices are forecast to head over $3 this summer, and likely much higher when a forecast global "oil crunch" hits by 2014 or so. 

Besides the economic risks, circa-twentieth-century sprawl has destroyed valuable farmland, sensitive wildlife habitat, and irreplaceable drinking water systems at great environmental, economic, and social cost. We can no longer manage and develop our communities with no regard for the limits of natural resources and ecological systems that provide our most basic needs.

A shining alternative is metropolitan areas that have begun to plan for the future by building their resilience with economic, energy, and environmental uncertainty in mind: top U.S. metro locations include Portland, Oregon, Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Denver, and suburbs such as Davis, California and Alexandria, Virginia. These communities are employing some of the following key strategies that underpin resilient urbanism:

Build and re-build denser and smarter

Most U.S. suburban and urban population or use densities need to be increased so that energy-efficient transportation choices like public transit, bicycling and walking can flourish. Multi-modal mobility cannot succeed at the densities found in most American suburban communities today. Increasing density doesn't have to mean building massive high-rises: adding just a few stories on existing or new mixed-use buildings can double population density--and well-designed, increased density can also improve community quality of life and economic vitality.

Focus on water use efficiency and conservation

Our freshwater supply is one of our most vulnerable resources in the United States. Drought is no longer just a problem for Southwestern desert cities--communities in places like Texas, Georgia and even New Jersey recently had to contend with water shortages. As precipitation patterns become less reliable and underground aquifers dry up, more communities will need to significantly reduce water demand through efficiency, conservation, restrictions and "tiered pricing," which means a basic amount of water will be available at a lower price; above average use will become increasingly expensive the more that is used.

Global climate change is already thought to be melting mountain snowpack much earlier than average in the spring, causing summer and fall water shortages. This has serious planning and design implications for many metro areas. For example, Lake Mead, which provides 90% of the water used by Las Vegas (above photo) and is a major water source for Phoenix and other Southwestern cities, has a projected 50% chance of drying up for water storage by 2021.

Focus on food

Urban areas need to think much bigger and plan systemically for significantly increased regional and local food production. Growing and processing more food for local consumption bolsters regional food security and provides jobs while generally reducing the energy, packaging and storage needed to transport food to metro regions. In Asia and Latin America--even in big cities like Shanghai, China; Havana, Cuba; and Seoul, South Korea--there are thriving small farms interspersed within metro areas.

Gardens--whether in backyards, community parks, or in and on top of buildings--can supplement our diets with fresh local produce. Denver's suburbs, for instance, have organized to preserve and cultivate unsold tract home lots for community garden food production.

Think in terms of inter-related systems

If we view our urban areas as living, breathing entities--each with a set of basic and more specialized requirements--we can better understand how to transform our communities from random configurations into dynamic, high-performance systems. The "metabolism" of urban systems depends largely on how energy, water, food and materials are acquired, used and, where possible, reused. From these ingredients and processes (labor, use of knowledge) come products, services, and--if the system is efficient--minimal waste and pollution. 

Communities and regions should decide among themselves which initiatives reduce their risks and provide the greatest "bang for the buck." Like the emergence of Wall Street's financial derivatives crisis in 2007, if we are kept in the dark about the potential consequences of our planning, resource and energy use in light of climate change or energy shortages, future conditions will threaten whole regional economies when they emerge.

Imagine if Las Vegas informed its residents and tourists on one 120-degree summer day that they would not be able to use a swimming pool or shower, let alone golf, because there simply wasn't any water left. Odds are that the days are numbered for having one's own swimming pool and a large, lush ornamental lawn in the desert Southwest, unless new developments and desert cities are planned with water conservation as having the highest design priority. 

By thinking of urban areas as inter-related systems economically dependent on water, energy, food and vital material resources, communities can begin to prepare for a more secure future. Merely developing a list of topics that need to be addressed--the "checklist" approach--will not prepare regional economies for the complexity of new dynamics, such as energy or water supply shortages, rising population, extreme energy price volatility and accelerating changes in regional climate influenced by global climate change.

Next Steps? Time to fold the climate action plan into a resilience action plan, so communities can addresses not only global climate change emissions, but also more urgent economic risks posed by climate change adaptation and resource availability.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.

With all the efforts going into urban climate action plans and carbon reduction, will many cities and suburbs be caught unprepared for other sustainability crises, such as acute water or energy shortages?

In carbon reduction management, should efforts such as focusing on renewable energy and energy efficiency deserve the highest priority, when a city such as San Francisco produces 78 percent of its greenhouse gases from transportation and only 17 percent from buildings? 

These are questions that both policy makers and sustainability planners need to consider as we move into an era of climate change compounded by either diminishing resources and/or resources that are expected to continue to have extreme price volatility, such as gasoline.  

My last post reviewed the findings of a UK industry study, partially backed by Richard Branson's Virgin Group, forecasting a major "oil crunch" by 2014-15 that could potentially mean shorter supplies and much higher prices for gasoline. Because US cities do not use oil for electric power generation (Honolulu is the only one that still does), there should be much more focus in US cities on transportation and in other key areas that will be more severely impacted by the high price of oil. Cities should look at everything from citizen and business mobility options, to supplies such as asphalt for street paving, to regional food security.

At no time has effective planning, land use and public transit been so key to ensuring economic vitality, as well as equity (access to jobs and services with transit), environmental sustainability, climate security and health. That doesn't mean that increasing renewable energy and energy efficiency shouldn't be part of every community's planning, projects and budgets. It does mean that cities will need to simultaneously prioritize action plans for carbon reduction, peaking energy and peaking freshwater, which very few are doing, outside of those involved in the Transition Town movement.

To help illustrate the complexities of what I'm getting at, consider the following example. Water use in California accounts for 20 percent of electrical power use. This energy is needed to move water supplies from places with water to those largely without or to treat drinking water and wastewater.

Renewable energy sources such as solar thermal generating plants also require great amounts of water, competing for precious water supplies that can be used for drinking water and growing or processing food.

So where do water, oil or grain shortages fit in your city's or region's sustainability plan? There are no easy answers, and metro regions and cities will want to collectively consider their own energy, water and food sources when trying to assess combined carbon reduction goals and resource depletion risk factors.

I've developed some general urban resiliency rules of thumb for an upcoming chapter in the Post Carbon Institute's Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century's Sustainability Crises, which is coming out this summer from the University of California Press and Watershed Media:

1. Planning: Enable the development of vibrant mixed-use communities and higher-density regional centers, that create a sense of place, allow for transportation choices (other than private automobiles), and protect regional agricultural, watershed, and wildlife habitat lands.
2. Mobility: Invest in high-quality pedestrian, bicycle, and public transit infrastructure with easy access, shared connectivity and rich information sources, from signage to cell phone alerts.
3. Built Environment: Design new buildings and associated landscaping--and retrofit existing buildings--for state-of-the-art energy (smart grid applications), and resource efficiency, integrated with mobility options.
4. Economy: Support businesses in order to provide quality local jobs and to meet the needs of the new economy with renewable energy and other "green" technologies and services. Support local and regional economic decision-makers in adapting to the new world of rising prices, volatile energy supplies and national demographic shifts.
5. Food: Develop regional organic food production, processing, and metro-area distribution networks.
6. Resources: Drastically cut use of water, waste and materials, re-using them whenever possible.
7. Management: Engage government, businesses and citizens together in resilience planning and implementation; track and communicate the successes, failures, and opportunities of this community-wide effort.

These categories are not meant to be "checklist" items for sustainability or resilience planning, but rather lay out the relevant areas that should comprise planning for integrated metro area systems. Each metro area and every city should be looking at these factors together, in order to model how well they are prepared to collaboratively contend with risks such as:

 

1.      Changing regional or local climate: extreme heat events, floods, droughts and other extreme weather events

2.      Prolonged drought, e.g. loss of mountain snowpacks or aquifers providing water for residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural use

3.      Oil crunches, including extreme price volatility; supply shocks from wars, political events, terrorism, natural disasters

4.      Food security risks from high oil prices, drought, energy-food competition (biofuels), large-scale contamination, etc.

Admittedly, the overlapping and inextricable problems that cities face today can be overwhelming, especially when budgets are tight or non-existent, and people's time is stretched to the breaking point.

Selective problem solving, such as climate action planning if it is done in isolation from resilience planning, however, may lend a false sense of security for cities on the brink of an era that promises to be very different than anything ever experienced in the past.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.   

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One of the great challenges in urban planning and green building has been material life cycle energy use--how steel, concrete and wood products are produced and transported. Add to that the decisions people make once construction is finished, and you can rightly conclude that development standards have only scratched the veneer of total energy and sustainability impacts.

In addition to material climate and resource burdens, there are myriad consequences on life-cycle energy use that arise from commuting and transit choices, food and product consumption, and building heating or cooling.

Scientists at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) have devised a tool that may soon provide governments and urban planners ways with which to model complete material, building and residents' anticipated energy use.

After a proof of concept was applied to a Jinan, China, housing development, LBNL has integrated building life-cycle assessment (LCA) and urban form agent-based modeling tools to capture embodied, operational and behavioral aspects of urban form energy use and emissions.

With hundreds of new cities being planned or built in China, Indonesia and India, new tools such as LBNL's will be critical in managing and reducing the energy, climate and environmental impacts of this unprecedented urban growth era.

Adding 1.1 billion people to new or growing Asian cities will produce more than half of the world's increase in global climate change-causing greenhouse gases by 2027, according to the Asian Development Bank.

I met last week in the green hills of Berkeley with David Fridley, Nate Aden and Yining Qin at LBNL's China Energy Group offices. The team demoed their new urban form and behavior energy analysis tool, describing how they based its performance on a variety of existing approaches in urban form-related analysis and life-cycle materials analysis.

The innovative aspect to the group's project is that they combined these existing cutting-edge approaches with an extensive survey of 230 residental households in the Lu Jing Superblock.

The researchers examined where Lu Jing Superblock (built in 2008) residents worked and went to school, how they commuted, where they shopped, what kinds of appliances they owned and how they used them, and even how much meat and what kind of products they ate.

The result was perhaps the closest-yet attempt at modeling and thus being able to forecast the complete energy needs of a segment of urban population. This allows an integrated assessment of required energy supply and expected impacts far beyond a single structure, energy type or industry.

It's like Sim City, but for addressing real planning, energy, and environmental challenges, which is something I've always wanted to see.

Simulations ran through the four seasons, showing cumulative energy use based on household and individual appliance and transportation use, showing cars or buses shuttling between supermarkets, offices, schools and the Lu Jing Superblock.

Total energy use and types of energy used were continually graphed, and the final results showed a breakdown between how much energy would be used by the buildings for power, cooling and heating,  as well as for transportation, food and other areas.

The group sees the tool being used by policymakers trying to prioritize energy and climate regulations in land use, transportation, planning and energy. Urban planners are another obvious group of potential end users.

One planning issue unresolved for future iterations of the tool would be how water use and supply could be added to the analytical capabilities. Or perhaps LBNL's energy tool can be combined with a software-based supply analysis and use forecasting tool for water. Water life-cycle analysis is an especially relevant issue when planning development in areas of India and Northern China that are facing climate-related drought and water supply shortages.

Still, the LBNL effort is significant in synthesizing existing tools and approaches on urban energy use into a single model that can help guide our world as we move into what is increasingly becoming the century of urbanization.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.  

This weekend I volunteered to warn shopkeepers and officials in my San Francisco suburb about dangerous urban flooding potential during the next week.

Every Friday noon in San Anselmo the "flood siren" (not disaster siren, mind) is tested. Within fifteen minutes of the last time it blasted for real in 2005, at 3:30 a.m. on a Saturday, three to four feet of water was soon gushing down the main street (see photo above) into homes and businesses. People here are acutely sensitive to heavy rain and the level of the town's creek, since they are still trying to rise up from that cold watery blow four years ago.

Up and down the California coast, metro areas including Los Angeles and San Francisco, are experiencing a series of El Nino-generated Pacific storms. Further inland, Phoenix will also take a big hit. The forecasted 6-10 inches of rain over the next days will almost certainly bring localized flooding and mudslides. Ocean storm swells will reach 20-30 feet on some parts of the coast by Thursday, lashing roads, infrastructure and housing. (Update Jan. 22: the storms this week luckily did not flood San Anselmo, but did cause heavy rains, some flooding and infrastructure damage throughout the state and Arizona, while also reducing the region's drought).

NOAA 5-day precipitation forecast from 1/16/10: small purple circles in California represent areas expected to receive 8+ inches.

How much of this weather and its impacts can be directly attributed to global climate change, I will not venture. The coastal and tidal flooding that is expected in California, however, will be one of the hallmarks of a changing climate. Another effect will be drought---which California and the Southwest have been experiencing for three years--the flip side of climate change's growing precipitation impacts. Coastal and desert urban areas in particular need to steel themselves for such a schizophrenic future.

Leaving things up to "officials" to figure out disaster plans is not recommended; true community resilience will require research, networking and knowledge sharing within and outside one's normal sphere. In my case, I think I was able to plug a few vital holes that may have been missed.

Most store owners in San Anselmo (pop. 12,000) that I spoke with were savvy about imminent flood danger. Based on their experience with the New Year's Eve flood of 2005, a few shopkeepers had excellent information and resources: they referred me to online creek-level readings ("anything over ten feet and I'm out of here," one man said), and email alerts that can be sent to email or phones from Nixle.com, a national information mass customization service that localizes updates on disasters, road closures and crime.

Nixle, for instance, has newly updated postings from the San Anselmo Police Department about potential hazards for flooding and safeguards. There's even a local AM radio (1610) station dedicated to disaster updates for the area.

But none of that seemed to be enough to really prepare people. One friend, a council member from the neighboring town that was also flooded in 2005, did not know about the severity of the forecast weather when I chanced to run into him at a musical performance over the weekend. He had me send him the forecast links from NOAA showing him exactly how much precip is expected to fall. He emailed back, "We're trying to get our flood plain residents to batten down the hatches. This should help."

Other small business owners that I spoke to were new to town, including immigrants. Unlike long-time business owners who told me they were warned by the police (or that had vivid mud-damaged inventory and moldy wallboard memories), the new shopkeepers knew almost nothing about flooding dangers or where to get the free sandbags.

Those who were around in December 30, 2005, have learned that floodgates (above, white board) for each business offers the best protection. In actuality, these are just rails installed on each side of entrance door where a piece of plywood can be inserted as a barrier against the torrents of water can come crashing against and under the front shop door (usually glass). Gates work even better than sandbags, but sandbags will prevent the glass doors from being smashed open.

The town and surrounding communities, even the federal government, tried to take some larger-scale policy actions after the 2005 flood, which caused almost $100 million in property damages county-wide. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) developed a new local flood risk map based on the 2005 event, and insurers offered policies that residents within the areas were urged to purchase. An extensive engineering study of the region's watershed is being made, a $125-per-property flood fee narrowly passed a controversial vote, while creek debris clean-ups have become popular all-age volunteer events each fall before the winter rainy season arrives.

Some houses have been rebuilt and raised above the flood-prone region along San Anselmo/Corte Madera Creek. This normally placid creek empties seven miles later into San Francisco Bay. High bay tides back the creek up so that it can't empty into the bay quickly.

San Anselmo/ Corte Madera Creek Watershed: San Anselmo is in center, San Francisco Bay, on right

Unfortunately, it doesn't take much time for San Anselmo/Corte Madera Creek (watershed in brown above) to back up from San Francisco Bay and rise in the Marin communities lining its flood plain, since it is surrounded by steep canyons that channel rainfall off nearby hills. Asphalt parking lots, impermeable pavement and poorly planned development have also increased the speed by which rainwater runs off into the creek. For instance, when I checked creek levels online Sunday the 17th, the creek was 2.9 feet, but after heavy rains Sunday night and Monday morning the creek was already over 6 feet. Flood stage is 11 feet (update 1/20/10: after heavy rain, the creek level went from 4 feet to 10 feet in matter of five hours, before receeding slightly) .

The irony of California's winter storms is that they bring needed water to reservoirs and mountain snowpack, promising to reduce or temporarily end the region's ongoing drought, which has been costing the agriculture industry and some cities hundreds of millions in lost revenue and in water purchases. Marin County last year was the first in the Bay Area to approve desalination from San Francisco Bay water, despite energy and marine environmental impacts along with a hefty $100 million-plus price tag.

Not surprisingly, the state's residents have a love-hate relationship with their winter weather. To make the affair even more volatile, climate change may be swinging the status from drought to flood in a matter of a few weeks.

Indeed, California's coastal metros (along with the Gulf Coast, including Florida and New Orleans) may be the first litmus test for how to adapt to the unpredictable excesses and scarcities of a changing climate.

 Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.