Professor Anu Ramaswami and her team discuss project partnerships with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the Word Bank's Global Platform for Sustainable Cities, that apply an urban metabolism systems approach to inform the development of resource-efficient and low-polluting infrastructures in global cities. Two recent reports developed with the UNEP articulate four key levers by which resource use and pollution in cities can potentially be reduced by a factor of 5; a review paper with the World Bank highlights both real-world policy experiments and knowledge gaps in efforts to incentivize systems-based infrastructure planning in fast-growing cities in China and India versus European and U.S. contexts. The second half of this seminar will discuss new multi infrastructure datasets and models developed specifically to address the challenge of air pollution in India,informing policy and action in Delhi and across 100 Indian cities.
Panelists:
Anu Ramaswami, STEP Area Chair and Director, Sustainable Healthy Cities Network
Ajay Nagpure, post-doctoral researcher. Ajay will be joining the World Resources Institute in India in 2019 as Head (Air Pollution)-Cities Program, World Resource Institute
Sam Tabory, research manager, Sustainable Healthy Cities Network