Page 192 - Çevre Şehir İklim İngilizce - Sayı 1

Urban Growth - Climate Change

emerge. If fresh water demand increases due to urban expansion, ecosystem
will run out of its capacity to provide services, and migration movements from
regional to global areas will take place due to concerns about human health.
Therefore, the existing resources in the city should be organized according
to development decisions/policies. In addition, instead of creating new
development areas, the policy of organizing present urban areas should be
adopted.
Another push factor of urban growth is defined as migration (Black et al,
2008: 5). As long as people keep moving from rural areas to urban areas,
urban growth will increase exponentially (United Nations, 2001: 15), which
creates vulnerability against climate change. For instance, extreme weather
conditions and natural disasters caused by climate change usually affect
vulnerable groups and immigrants in cities more. Thus, it is stated that
migration may result in socioeconomic fragilities (IPCC, 2007: 33). Furthermore,
migration results in increased human activities in cities, which constitute an
anthropogenic push factor for climate change. As a result, migration leads to
increased greenhouse gas emissions (Drake, 2013: 440).
Another issue concerning urban growth is land use policies (Zullo et al,
2019: 1745). In fact, land use policies are seen as not only a spatial, but also
a political solution to mitigate the effects of climate change. The main issue
here is to how to apply land use policies in cities according to local features
(Müller and Höfer, 2014: 111). For instance, when climate change effects such
as rising sea levels take place, coastal settlements may be greatly affected by
them, which is highly related to land use policies. If facilities are constructed in
risky areas due to the desire for urban growth, the effect of climate change will
be felt on residences as well as commercial and sociocultural facilities, which
has the capacity to destroy urban settlements (United Nations, 2001: 26). Land
appropriation decisions must be rearranged especially in coastal cities against
the effects of climate change. To illustrate, according to Scheurer et al (2013),
settlements located on the coastal regions of the city may be exposed to
extreme weather conditions such as hurricanes and rising sea levels. However,
it is emphasized that the weather conditions experienced in areas with little
to no urban activities and dense vegetation will be relatively less severe. For
this reason, it is critical to arrange the content of land use policies without
disrupting the effects of climate change. On the other hand, as land use
policies cope with interest at various scales, they are seen as an important
means for mitigating the effects of climate change (Scheurer et al, 2013: 9;
O’Donnell, 2019: 130). It is also stressed that development of land use policies
depend on not only the vision of the centralized management, but also that of
local managements and local dynamics (O’Donnell, 2019: 140).

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