A Green Revolution to Save the World's Cities From a Climate ... - Haaretz

A Green Revolution to Save the World's Cities From a Climate Change Crisis - Haaretz Magazine - Haaretz.com

A Green Revolution to Save the World's Cities From a Climate Change Crisis

Will global warming soon force city dwellers to be stuck at home for days on end? It will if we don’t wake up in time, warns Eleni Myrivili, a world-renowned expert on the subject. More greenery is just one solution

No one expected the brutal heat that struck the western Mediterranean in April. Schools in Spain canceled classes, and the government soon announced that it wants to ban work outside during extreme heat. When a rare heat wave assailed London the previous summer (topping 40 degrees Celsius, 104 Fahrenheit), the city center was emptier than usual and people eschewed public transportation. A few weeks ago in Thailand, when the heat index, which factors in relative humidity, reached 54 C (129 F), the authorities ordered everyone inside.

In the United States, more and more soldiers are suffering from heatstroke. In places that already suffer punishing temperatures like Persian Gulf cities, people have moved their lives into air-conditioned spaces as much as possible. Travel agents say that more and more tourists are factoring in temperatures when mulling their summer vacations.

Global warming is a fact already changing how people live around the world, especially their ability to conduct a full life outside the home. And even the most optimistic scenarios talk about more significant warming to come. As a result, countries and cities everywhere find themselves at a crossroads. Put simply, our treatment of the issue now will determine how we live tomorrow.

According to one forecast, from the middle of this century, Tel Aviv will suffer about two and a half months of sizzling days – meaning temperatures topping 33 C (91 F) – a year. And the center of the country is one of the country’s relatively cool regions. Try to imagine working out outside, or being one of the messengers, inspectors, farmers or house painters, or anybody else who toils in the sun.

How will a family spend time in a park when the jungle gym is boiling hot? And what will a life comported between one air-conditioned space and another feel like in a country already suffocatingly crowded?

“Public space will slowly die because of heat,” warns Eleni (Lenio) Myrivili, a world-renowned expert on the subject. “This is really detrimental for cities like ours, our societies, our cultures,” says Myrivili, who lives in Athens. “People aren’t used to isolating, to withdrawing into privacy. Our community has very much to do with exchange and common space.”

It’s clear from her comments that cities that don’t start adapting for the future will become air-conditioned bubbles for a good part of the year. “The best thing we can do is to make our cities greener and bluer,” she says.

Myrivili proposes a surprising number of ways to cope with the future. Although she admits she’s “extremely concerned,” she’s light years from being a prophet of doom who titillates her audience with dire forecasts. On the contrary, she’s optimistic about cities’ ability to cope with the looming changes, if they choose to do so.

But doing that will require nothing less than a revolution. Myrivili mentions vast projects of recent years like the disassembling of a highway to revive a cool stream in Seoul, the creation of immense green corridors in the Colombian city of Medellín, and the construction of green roofs on public housing in Amsterdam. And she encourages bold, breakthrough thinking. She even talks about returning to ancient construction techniques that cooled structures naturally.

Her vision is especially relevant for Israel, which lies in a region that will suffer more from the warming trend. But like the other fundamental problems afflicting Israel – the occupation, the overcrowding, the rapid increase in the number of ultra-Orthodox Jews dependent on welfare, this one calls for complex measures that require long-range planning, political will, and the mobilization of the public. And time is running out.

A major reference point for climatologists is the year 2050, which isn’t so far off. As experts told Haaretz, people who think they can wake up in 25 years, plant a few trees, lower the AC by a couple of degrees and solve the problem don’t understand the magnitude of the challenge. Climate migration out of Israel could take place.

Israel’s protest movement provides a historic opportunity, perhaps the last one, to seriously address the problem. It’s obvious that deep, innovative thinking is needed about life in the city, and about how we build our houses, office buildings and streets. The climate crisis isn’t just the brief of the Energy Ministry or the Environmental Protection Ministry; interministerial cooperation is needed, including from the treasury. For example, it’s absurd to try to solve the housing crisis without taking global warming into account. Nor can we truly tackle the problem without solving the country’s transportation problems.

The question isn’t whether Israel will wake up, but when.

‘Tel Aviv will empty out’

Until recently, Myrivili was the chief heat officer for Athens, one of the hottest cities in Europe. Currently she’s the global chief heat officer for the United Nations, working mainly with its Habitat program, whose mission includes sustainable urban development. She also works with the UN’s environmental program and with the World Health Organization, and is cooperating with the European Union’s mission for climate adaptation.

She says that currently there are 350 major cities around the world where people are struggling with temperatures above 35 C (95 F), which affects about 200 million people. “By 2050, it will be 1,000 cities and 1.6 billion city dwellers facing extreme heat for three consecutive months or more a year,” she says.

The Middle East is warming at a rate above the world average, but heat isn’t the only variable. Many studies note that the way a city is built has a significant impact on the heat’s intensity.

Here lies a great opportunity to improve living conditions, parallel to the effort to stop using the gas, coal and oil that are heating up the planet. Stopping global warming is a challenge for the whole world, but how we deal with the effects of the crisis is a far more local question. In 2050, some countries and cities will be pleasant to live in, and some will be intolerable.

The price will be high if we closet ourselves in air-conditioned spaces during the hot months. It will keep us apart, and air conditioners will aggravate the warming because they emit heat. “We can’t just air-condition everything. It’s ridiculous. It’s going to throw our planet into a total climate crisis immediately,” Myrivili says.

The alternative is to follow the lead of cities that have already introduced broad cooling efforts. In an era when interpersonal relations are disintegrating due to our screens and construction is swallowing up ever more open spaces, the effort to preserve a pleasant common space is crucial for the nature of society itself.

So what’s Israel’s forecast for 2050? To answer that, Haaretz spoke with local and foreign scientists, officials and other experts, and examined data of both the United Nations and the Israel Meteorological Service. The trend is clear but the answer is complex.

“Heat is idiosyncratic, it’s not easily quantifiable,” Myrivili says. Different scientists examine different things, the climate changes from one country to the next, from city to city, sometimes from neighborhood to neighborhood. And heat’s intensity and lethality vary based on a range of causes, including relative humidity or even the time of the year. Direct radiation from the sun also plays a role, as does the radiation returned by buildings, concrete and glass windows. So we shouldn’t get stuck on one number, Myrivili says.

Still, some numbers are necessary to understand the big picture. Already now, before the warming goes into high gear, Israel already suffers temperatures of 40 degrees C and higher. The number of days with temperatures above 33 C will nearly double to 76 a year by 2050, the Tel Aviv municipality forecasts.

Haaretz’s Lee Yaron has reported that the authorities expect 60 days a year of 30-plus temperatures in Jerusalem, while at Lake Kinneret – the Sea of Galilee – it will be nearly 60 days at 38 C or more. For the Negev in the south, it will be 55 days at 34 C or higher, and for the Jordan Valley and the Arava in the east, 85 days at 38 C or higher – that’s 100 F.

As Prof. Hadas Saaroni, a climatologist at Tel Aviv University’s Department of Geography and the Human Environment, puts it, “The summer is getting longer. The heat index will increase. We’re not in an area where it will be completely impossible to venture outside, but our ability to be outside will be significantly reduced.” Dr. Orly Ronen, an urban heat expert also of Tel Aviv University’s human environment department, adds that “the things we’re talking about are an unpleasant environment. There will be many private spaces that are pleasant and climatized – and for the rich.”

What can be done? The solutions will have to be local, based in part on the geographic location and each city’s special characteristics. Myrivili talks about Athens’ plan to use water from an aqueduct built by Roman Emperor Hadrian in the year 140 C.E. to widen the city’s green footprint and add more shade.

“The aqueduct is a brilliant engineering feat that runs underground for 24 kilometers [15 miles] using only gravity,” she says. As part of the cooling effort, Athens has started repairing dozens of historic fountains.

Paris has joined in. The city is known for its tremendous efforts to replace cars with bicycles, but it has done far more than that. For years, an 80-kilometer [50-mile] network of underground pipes has been pumping water from the Seine to cool down buildings, including the Louvre. The city will extend the network to more than 250 kilometers, a move expected to save Paris one full degree of warming compared to the use of air-conditioning for the same purposes.

“They’re also redesigning the schoolyards,” Myrivili says, referring to the Oasis program, which aims to add more trees and plants and remove asphalt, which absorbs and then radiates heat onto the children.

Another example can be taken from Seoul; two decades ago, the South Korean capital ripped out the Cheonggye Expressway, which for 35 years blighted adjacent neighborhoods. A new environmentally-friendly mayor launched the $380 million project to bring back the stream that once flowed there, pumping in water to create an urban park. As one planner noted, the project lowered the ground temperature there by 3.6 C compared to areas 400 meters away from the park. Since then, more roads have been removed across the city.

Myrivili gained much of her experience in Athens, a city facing problems familiar to every Israeli. Athens is one of the most densely populated cities in Europe; it’s racked with cars, air conditioners, asphalt and concrete buildings that reflect heat back into the environment.

The temperature difference between central Athens and the suburbs can reach 10 degrees C during the day – the “urban heat island” effect that for some cities can produce an almost unimaginable difference of 15 degrees. As Myrivili notes, there’s a clear correlation between the frequency of extreme heat and work accidents – and surges of violence. The United Nations’ International Labor Organization says temperatures of 33 C can reduce one’s work capacity by half.

Heat also increases your chances of dying, or at least being hospitalized; Israel’s Health Ministry is among the agencies around the world that have identified a link between global warming and hospitalizations, with the Environmental Protection Ministry, the Meteorological Service and the National Emergency Management Authority all noting greater mortality during heat waves.

“We know [that these connections are] underreported,” Myrivili says, “because often the cases of people who end up in hospitals or die during periods of extreme heat aren’t recorded as related to extreme heat. [The authorities] report that somebody had a stroke or a heart attack or kidney failure.”

Israeli experts are also trying to understand the economic effects. Last month the Israeli Forum of Self-Government Cities (Forum 15) held a symposium on “urban resilience,” with initial findings presented from a study by the Technion’s Samuel Neaman Institute for National Policy. Environmental economist Dana Gabay noted that the economic costs to Israel’s cities in 2050 are expected to be significant.

But perhaps the biggest effect of high heat will be on the social fabric itself. If we don’t act, Myrivili says, “more and more we’ll see vibrant cities like Athens and Tel Aviv empty out because nobody will want to be outside. We love sitting in cafés and eating and having drinks at night outdoors; we love walking around and going to stores or just getting together and sitting in a park. All this will have to withdraw inside.”

Still, Myrivili says she has a hard time persuading people to take the necessary action. “Especially in countries like ours [Greece and Israel], we’re used to heat and think it’s not a big deal, but heat has changed. We’re getting more extreme temperatures and longer and more frequent periods of extreme temperatures. These are temperatures that our bodies aren’t used to, or our cities.”

Is Athens burning?

Myrivili didn’t plan to make urban heating the focus of her life. She holds a Ph.D in anthropology from Columbia University and taught at the University of the Aegean, which is spread over several islands. But the Athens wildfires of 2007 changed her life. She vividly remembers the raging fire, especially the helplessness felt by her and others in watching the flames on the city’s outskirts day after day. “That crazy period of wildfires really freaked me out and made me start thinking about climate change and getting into politics.”

She joined Greece’s Green Party and in 2014 was elected to the Athens City Council, before becoming deputy mayor. “People were talking about the migrants and the economic crisis and how that created the social crisis and how that created the political crisis. We had a far-right party that got 15 percent of the vote and entered parliament; it was later deemed a criminal organization because it actually killed people,” she says.

“People were talking about a lot of different critical issues, but nobody was talking about climate change, and nobody was talking about heat, the main problem for us. The main extreme weather we’re dealing with is heat. It became clear that I had to talk about that and had to start preparing the city for that, because nobody else would.” Myrivili created the title deputy mayor for urban nature, resilience and climate change adaptation – “to get everybody to understand that all these things are interconnected.”

She helped create a climate program for Athens, a key effort in securing a crucial loan from the European Investment Bank for the city. In 2020, Myrivili completed a year as a Loeb Fellow of advanced environmental studies at Harvard. She then returned to Athens as the city’s chief heat officer, a position created in cooperation with the Arsht-Rock Center at the Atlantic Council in the United States, which seeks new methods for coping with heat around the world. She’s due to visit Israel this month to conduct a workshop at the invitation of the Planning Administration, funded by the European Union and in cooperation with Forum 15.

In addition to the Roman aqueduct, Myrivili mentions plans to establish green corridors in Athens and a bevy of “pocket parks” throughout the city. “All of these things are great, but we need even more, it needs to be even more radical,” she says. “We need to really open up the asphalt and create long forests that cut through the city – not just parks, but thick forests that wind through the city.”

Sounds off the wall? As part of the “urban forests” project that Paris declared two years ago, trees will replace asphalt at major sites in that city. Dozens of green corridors have already been created in Medellín, providing perpetual shade for long stretches and lowering temperatures.

As reported by Haaretz’s Yaron, the country’s tree cover is in a dismal state, particularly in poorer residential areas, including many Arab ones. Myrivili notes that trees are the most important tool for now, “but what else do we have? Mobility. Mobility has to be different. We need cars that don’t create heat. We also have to understand that we can’t all have cars anymore. We have to move away from private ownership of cars.

“This is something that can be done. Maybe we need to start taxing private ownership of cars more and think of the whole question of mobility differently. The fact that we had these big asphalt roads with parked cars on the side taking up 60 or 70 percent of our public space is insane.”

A precondition for forgoing private cars is, of course, a good public transportation system, as well as intelligent urban planning that reduces the need for long and frequent journeys.

Maybe the most thrilling element of Myrivili’s vision is her evocation of construction techniques from history in the planning of buildings and other structures. The rationale is straightforward, she says. The air conditioner allowed planners to discard techniques from the past that cooled built-up spaces naturally.

“We need to take old knowledge about thick walls, small windows and the kind of material that doesn’t heat up, that doesn’t store heat, that doesn’t radiate heat – techniques of design to create self-cooling conditions that have better air movement within the space,” Myrivili says.

“This is design that’s knowledgeable about thermodynamics and about how surfaces react to heat and how air heats up and how humidity interacts with surfaces and air. This is something I’m just starting to see at urban design companies and certain universities, mainly among urban planners and landscape architects, though not yet in architecture as such.”

An example is the Cartuja Qanat project, a structure designed for public events and leisure going up with EU financing in Seville, Spain. According to the planners, this project “will encourage using the street as a social facilitator, and will boost it and involve the entire ecosystem of the city.” One aim is “to preserve the Mediterranean way of life” by ensuring habitable spaces outside.

Myrivili adds: “The way we’ve built our cities and the way we use our cities is very much based on the logic that we’ll always have fossil fuels to burn [for] heating and cooling whole buildings. We’ve forgotten the type of materials we used in the past when people gave thought to how to best adapt construction to the local climate. Now, because we have fossil fuels, we just use cement and concrete – materials that heat up incredibly.”

Green roofs and blue roofs

The problem with many of these measures is that implementation takes time – but temperatures continue to rise. So Myrivili spends much of her time on short-term activities of raising awareness and preparing for the extreme heat waves that are becoming ever more frequent.

This approach jibes with a warning by the executive director of the Israel Meteorological Service, Nir Stav, who told Haaretz that we might see heat waves in the coming years where temperatures hit 50 degrees C (122 F).

“In terms of raising awareness, the most important thing we did in Athens is the classification of heat waves,” Myrivili says. “We created three categories. We studied the type of heat that affected Athens in recent decades and figured out what types of heat raise the mortality rate and by what percentage. We created an algorithm that captures that relationship. With this algorithm we can create a forecast for an approaching heat wave and grade it based on how dangerous we expect it to be.

“We created a system that warns people and tells them what to do. You have to send messages, especially to the people who are most vulnerable. Sometimes this needs to be done by the people who come into contact with them, such as hospital staff or social workers. What are the categories for vulnerability? Homeless people? How are you going to communicate with them? You have to do it through the NGOs that come in contact with them. You have to make sure that the right kind of message gets to different categories of people, so that they get the information and solutions they need.

“We mapped the city and saw which neighborhoods heat up more, the hot spots. You’ve done the same thing in Tel Aviv; this is one of the first things a city should do. We’re making sure that in those neighborhoods we have areas that are air conditioned, where people can go if needed.” Supplementing this is a website, an app and a phone line to provide information on how to behave during extreme heat.

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According to Stav, the Israeli authorities aren’t ready for an extreme heat wave, but at the symposium of local governments, tools were presented – though still in the development stage – to help spot dangers and weak population groups. One is an online mapping tool shown by the chief scientist at the Environmental Protection Ministry, Prof. Noga Kronfeld-Schor.

What about other aspects of the problem in Israel? “There are very great differences between cities, regions and vulnerabilities, but the main gap is in knowledge about the subject” among cities, says Maya Crabtree, the head of Forum 15’s environment, climate and planning unit. “Unlike floods and storms, the damage caused by heat is hard to see with your eyes, and that’s one reason the subject is still in relative infancy in Israel.

“A few municipalities and authorities are addressing the issue. The main thing that’s being done is mapping, but that’s challenging. There’s no clear methodology. What’s considered an excessively hot day? What’s the breaking point at which the public space becomes unpleasant? A methodology needs to be developed, and cooperation is needed from the government and academia. Yes, moves are afoot on the subject, but lacking that information, municipalities remain on their own.”

There are many pilot programs, she notes, mostly of “green roofs” or “blue roofs” – the latter incorporate technology that channels rainwater onto the vegetation and onward, helping reduce flooding. “We’re seeing a growing awareness of the need for shade,” Crabtree says.

“What’s still not sufficiently known – and this is what we’re trying to develop – is an understanding of the link between urban planning and heat in the public space and the private space. I’m referring to how construction and the cross section of the street exert an influence, but also to the effect of the materials chosen for sidewalks and the walls of buildings so that they won’t reflect the heat back on us. This is just in its infancy.”

A number of municipalities have plans to deal with the issue, Crabtree says, but a distinction has to be made between general plans that largely map challenges and genuine working documents. Most locales haven’t yet reached the more advanced stage; for now only Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan come to mind, she says. Ronen of Tel Aviv University is advising municipalities and the Environmental Protection Ministry is helping municipalities with advice and funding to improve measures such as tree planting. But without a doubt much more action is needed.

The broader problem, though, is that “for every positive step a municipality takes, there are two or 10 [unhelpful] steps on a larger scale by bodies responsible for housing, like the Housing Ministry or the National Planning and Building Council.

“All kinds of umbrella agreements create a great many residential units. Because of Israel’s major population increase, there’s a very great need or emphasis on the number [of units] they want to push ahead with as quickly as possible. I won’t say that the matter is ignored, but in general the subject of adaptation for heat, shading or the use of certain materials isn’t at the center of things and isn’t classified as an infrastructure subject. For example, in a comprehensive plan to build a new neighborhood, you won’t find reducing heat or cooling the outdoor space among the goals.”

According to Crabtree, as a first step for planning, efforts against heat have to be in every plan. As for trees, they should be classified as infrastructure in every respect – “like roads, like public transportation.” To truly close the gaps, “comprehensive change and all-inclusive cooperation” is needed.

The public space, she says, “isn’t simply a place that people pass through, it’s a place we want to be in. And even if you just pass through, you want it to be pleasant and comfortable. But it’s a disappearing space, and this should reinforce our commitment to make it pleasant, precisely because of the pressures of development and the birthrate. Precisely because we know that there will be fewer public spaces, we need to invest in transforming what we have into something far more qualitative.”

Finally, Crabtree stresses the need for a guiding hand. “It’s important to understand that the municipalities are trying, and the people who have written policy on the subject have done so based on the knowledge they had, and on their own. But this is something crying out for government guidance.”

Nir Stav of the Meteorological Service notes another key point. Even today, more than 35 years after The New York Times wrote that climate change had finally been detected in real life, not just in models, Israel doesn’t have a research and computing center that generates accurate climate forecasts.

“That’s the nuts and bolts,” he says. “Clear data needs to be available to the decision-makers, and then another layer of risk analyses in every planning process.” Such a computing center is currently on the way, but producing such complex data will take more time.

As Stav puts it, “The government understood that there were knowledge gaps that needed to be closed, and then it took another five years until money was allocated. And then this didn’t come directly from the treasury, it was collected from other ministries, and it was less than what Israel’s Academy of Sciences recommended. Bottom line: Things have been moving slowly, and the government still hasn’t laid the foundation for the discussions on the problem.”

If there’s one thing that’s certain, it’s that the warming trend isn’t about to stop anytime soon.

“I think that if I weren’t doing all these things, I would become depressed, totally depressed,” Myrivili says. “ Climate change makes a lot of us feel disempowered, because we think that not enough is being done. ... It’s important to find a role, or even create a role, that will alleviate the feeling of helplessness and let you feel that you can bring about change.”

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