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DPU’s Prof. Adriana Allen joins team to produce UNEP’s Global Environment Outlook Report for Cities

23 October 2019

DPU's Prof Adriana Allen joins a team of international experts to produce UNEP’s Global Environment Outlook (GEO) Report for Cities, and will act as a co-leader of the final chapter that examines pathways for bold city action towards environmentally just urbanisation.

Navigating transformative change through and from cities

The report is a derivative product of GEO Sixth Assessment report and aims to inform, engage and support dialogue among decision makers and other actors involved in urban issues. Prof. Allen together with Jeb Brugmann will act as co-leaders of the final chapter that examines pathways for bold city action towards environmentally just urbanisation.

The team met in Vancouver last week to work together on a zero draft of GEO for Cities. The report is expected to be launched towards the end of 2020 and will be a resource for a wide range of ‘city-makers’ to navigate through complex processes such as decarbonisation, biodiversity, city-decoupling from intensive energy and resource use, and food and water security, among other issues. GEO for Cities will build upon current trends and projected scenarios to grasp the type of changes required at scale for cities to champion transformative action towards SDG 11, the Paris Agreement and Sendai Framework, among other global commitments.

The objective is to develop pathways that explore what can be done from a wide range of urban systems.  Reflecting upon the outcomes of the first team meeting, Prof. Allen says: “Capturing the full diversity of urban trajectories across the global South and North, is a key objective of the report. We aim to take readers beyond the notion that there is a single pathway towards urban sustainability, to examine critically paradigms that over-emphasise technological change as the main forward and instead offer a fresh perspective of the multiple ways in which cities across the world are facing key challenges exacerbated by climate change.”   

 

[Photo caption] GEO for Cities team in Vancouver