Environmental justice, and how to achieve it, may be our greatest challenge
Any assessment of the environmental challenges facing London needs to have some sort of benchmark. Air quality in the city, for example, has recently failed to meet strict European standards, but compared to the situation before the clean air acts of the 1950s the situation is clearly superior. The river Thames these days is home to a breadth of wildlife almost unimaginable a few decades ago; the Thames barrier provides protection from the threat of mass flooding; Green Belt legislation has helped to ensure that there has not been a loss of land to development and a greater proportion of London‘s land area is ’green' than any comparable city.
In historical terms, then, there is a positive story to be told, and that story should not be lightly ignored. However, the perspective adopted on this site and which will be running through the debates ahead is forward looking: we are interested in the city of tomorrow, in understanding what a genuinely sustainable London might look like.
From such a perspective, we can certainly be more critical. Climate change and waste, obviously, are major problems, and are covered on other pages. Other issues - localised flooding, the loss of indigenous species, problems of local environmental amenity through littering and fouling, issues of fly-tipping, land contamination - may be less dramatic or obvious, but they are no less real and, cumulatively, have the potential to undermine any more general claim that London's environment is on a positive footing.
London may be ‘environmentally efficient’ because it packs a lot of people into a small area, but its environmental footprint is immense. London's environmental challenges are not restricted by the M25: they stretch across the rest of the UK and the world. A responsible city is thinking not merely of its direct, local impacts, but those on the far side of the world. It is surely part of being a sustainable city to acknowledge the fact that making the things we buy and coping with the stuff we throw away - both of which are managed by people who live in other countries - is our responsibility.
Aside from the specific environmental challenges, however, there are perhaps two over-arching challenges that need our attention. The first is the issue of environmental justice. There is now substantial evidence, backing up the common sense, that poor people tend to experience more ‘environmental bads’ and have lesser access to ‘environmental goods’ than rich people. Poor people tend to live in the dirtiest neighbourhoods, with the worst air quality (the neighbourhoods are often closest to the busiest roads), with the highest risk of flooding. They tend to have less access to green space, and the green space to which they do have access tends to be of poorer quality. The rich, by contrast, generally live furthest from the landfill sites and the energy-from-waste plants, furthest from busy roads and industrial sites, and have houses where there are lots of lovely trees and nice parks.
This is unjust. A sustainable, compassionate city would not tolerate this. In the sustainable London of tomorrow, no one should have to endure a worse environment than someone else just because they are poor.
The second challenge is to consider what, if anything, can be done about this kind of thing. In general, environmental challenges have for a long time tended to come towards the bottom of the urban To Do list. Strategic Environmental Assessments and Sustainability Impact Assessments and a variety of regulatory and legislative instruments act either as minimum standards or as filtering mechanisms to eliminate the worst possible negative consequences of human activity, but in general the economic issues (create money, create jobs) come first and the social issues (improve health, support communities) come second. Looking after sparrows and rivers and managing waste and trying to stop cars causing poor air quality comes further down the list.
The idea of ‘eco-systems services’ is a recent attempt to address some of this problem, by trying to quantify the benefits to society provided by various environmental systems. Clean air, for example, provides the service of preventing respiratory disease; trees provide the service of absorbing carbon dioxide, as well as helping to deal with the urban heat island effect and providing habitat for a wide variety of animal species; many animal species - bees, most obviously - play a role in pollination that is hugely valuable in maintaining the productivity of agriculture. If we can estimate the value played by these things, perhaps they can be accounted for alongside the economic and the social on a more even footing, making it easier to give them the priority that many feel they should.
Is this the way forward? Do we need to commodify our environment, convert it into money? Or can we find other ways to ensure that the London of tomorrow has an environment of which we will be proud? Which environmental issues matter most? Why? The debates ahead will explore these questions, and pose many more.
