Climate change focus moves to the suburbs as cities continue to sprawl

You might think that cramped and crowded cities, dense with roads and highrisetowers, are bad for the environment and bad for addressing climate change.

But it is a long-established principle of environmental economics that while the land beneath urban cores has been largely stolen from nature, cities provideecologicalbenefits. Packing people all into one place, called "densification," makes carbon-friendly public transit work. It also allows us to concentrate services such assewage treatment and energy systems.

Perhaps mostimportant, environmentalists have hoped that concentrating people into dynamic cities such asLondon, New York, Montreal and Vancouverwould take the pressure off surrounding green spaces that are so essential for keeping the environment healthy.

But there are increasing signs that those hopes have faded and thatCOVID-19 has just made things worse. Climate scientists say it is time to take that into account.

The race for space

"In the early 2000s, there was a lot of talk about a return to the cities, and millennials and boomers wanting to be back, choosing cities over suburbs, but that has been somewhat disproven," said Hannah Teicher, a researcher at the University of Victoria's Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions in British Columbia.

In the midst of the well-publicized pandemic race for space as Canadians worked, went to school and entertained themselves in homes that suddenly seemed too crowded Statistics Canada released data showing thatrather than rushing into cities to take advantage of their vibrancy and services, people were moving out.

"Urban sprawl continues, with Toronto and Montreal both experiencing record-high population losses to surrounding areas," said a mid-January report from the statistical agency.

In June,Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced "the first-everCensus of the Environment," a Statistics Canada program to quantifythe country's green spaces and how quickly they are being lost to industry and urbanization.

One of the difficult things for the Statistics Canada researchers working on the new census, including the project's research manager,FranoisSoulard, is how to put an economic value on the benefits they offer.

Green payoff versus profits

"We know that ecosystems provide goods and services that we rely on every day, generally without noticing it,"Soulardsaidin an email conversation on Friday. Until crises like the heat dome in Western Canada or deadly floods arrive, things such asair quality, carbon sequestration, flood protection and heat mitigation seldom stack up against the profits of real estatedevelopment especially when Canadians are demanding more single-family homes.

In fact, some analysts, including from the real estate industry, say the solution to a housing shortage is to cut red tape and let builders build.

According to new research publishedlast week by Teicher andtwocolleagues, if thetrend away from downtown cores continues, it is essential to urgently refocus some of the effort to fight climate change from cities to suburbia.

While the authors still believe urban densification is better for the environment, their papertitled Climate Solutions to Meet the Suburban Surge: Leveraging COVID-19 recovery to enhance suburban climate governance addresses the reality that in bothCanada and the United States,thetrend toward sprawl will be hard to stop.

The only pragmatic solution, Teichersaid in an interview on Friday, is to develop policy to mitigate the worstimpacts of suburban and exurban sprawl.

Making the burbs better

"We're not going to turn suburbs into cities, and suburban development is going to continue. The question is how can you redevelop existing suburbs to some extent and how can you makenew suburbs better," she said.

With new suburbs, one technique is to build around the ecological goods and servicesthat Soulard referred to so that they continue to provide their economic and climate benefits. That requires rules demanding developers preserve watersheds, wetlands and forest rather than paving over them, Teicher said.

WATCH | Montrealers are leaving the island for the suburbs:

Montrealers are leaving the island for the suburbs

4 years ago

Duration 5:06

A CMHC report says theres increased demand for homes in the suburbs. Debra Arbec speaks with economist Francis Cortellino about whats driving Montrealers out of the city.

Part of the solution is to increase the density of suburbs similar to the push inexisting urban cores, where in what has been called"socialism for the rich," swaths of single-family homes have become sacrosanct despite a high cost to all taxpayers.

Teicher's research notes thatalready,in suburbs surrounding Vancouver and Portland, Ore., there has been what she describes as "gentle densification" as property owners have been allowed to build more housingon existing suburban lots.

Other suggestionsincludestopping the trend toward more space per person in suburban construction somethingthat may have been aggravated by the pandemic urge for greater living space and making suburbanhousing more energy efficient.

Teicher's research shows that rules insisting on better insulation and airtight construction can make it more practical for suburban energy to be produced locally using solar andground source heat pumps.

One trend that is already happening is that suburbs have developed their own highrise business centres that, combined with a pandemic shop local movement,could meanfewer polluting automobile trips to city centres or malls.

"On the global climate stage, there's been a lot of attention to cities," Teicher said. "I think we need equal attention to suburbs."

Follow Don Pittis on Twitter @don_pittis