Urban Areas and Human Settlements

The built environment, including mobility and other infrastructures, results in around 70% of global emissions, loss of biodiversity, resource exploitation, and unfulfilled dreams for populations drawn to urban areas and human settlements by the promise of a better life, more jobs, multiple services, and modern amenities.

Wealthier societies, though, continue to pursue unlimited growth in construction - with the belief that this can be ‘decarbonised’ using renewables, energy efficiency, biomaterials and electrification. The challenge is to constrain growth in built floor area and spread of settlements, which exceeds population growth, and to redistribute the need for more construction between the Global North and South, according to needs and not wants.

There is an urgent need for tackling the root causes of climate change, biodiversity losses, poverty, inequity, and environmental despoilation. Sufficiency is the missing piece to achieve North/South equity and within countries equity in the access and the use of the resources.

Wealthier societies of the North to reconsider projections of future demand for the new, while making a better use of their existing building and infrastructure stock via adaptive reuse, sharing, refurbishments, repurposing, and strategic asset management. Indigenous knowledge could be used in the global South to avoid the lock-in-effect of the Northern solutions.