Impacto ambiental

Environment and Urbanization
http://eau.sagepub.com The environmental impact of cities
Peter Newman Environment and Urbanization 2006; 18; 275 DOI: 10.1177/0956247806069599 The online version of this article can be found at: http://eau.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/18/2/275

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The environmental impact of cities

PETER NEWMAN

Peter Newman is Professor of City Policy and Director of the Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy at Murdoch University, Perth, Australia. He has spent the past few years working with the Western Australian and New South Wales state governments on sustainability and its application to cities,regions and states, and he wrote the W A State Sustainability Strategy, which was the first in the world at state level. Research interests have included collecting data on global cities, and stories of how they are achieving sustainability. His book with Jeff Kenworthy, entitled Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence, was launched at the White House in 1999. In 2006–2007Professor Newman will be a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Address: Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy, Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia 6150; e-mail: P.Newman@murdoch.edu.au. 1. Ehrlich, P R, A H Ehrlich and J Holdren (1970), Population, Resources Environment, Freeman, San Francisco, page 259.

A B S T R A C T Cities are growing inexorably,causing many to think that inevitably their environmental impact will worsen. In this paper, three approaches to understanding the environmental impact of cities are analyzed, namely population impact, Ecological Footprint and sustainability assessment. Although the population impact model provides some perspective on local impact, and the Ecological Footprint model on global impact, only thesustainability assessment approach allows us to see the positive benefits of urban growth and provides policy options that can help cities reduce their local and global impact while improving their liveability and opportunity, which continue to drive their growth. This approach is then applied in the city of Sydney. KEYWORDS

cities / Ecological Footprint / environmental impact / population impact /sustainability assessment

I. INTRODUCTION
The continued rapid growth of cities raises a number of persistent questions. Are they becoming so big that their negative impacts outweigh the opportunities that they provide? Is urbanization damaging the planet or helping save it? How do we assess the growth of population in a city? Can the concept of sustainability provide a better way ofunderstanding the local and global environmental impact of cities? Is there a future for cities? These questions will be addressed using three approaches: population impact, Ecological Footprint and sustainability assessment.

II. POPULATION IMPACT
From the 1960s, as global ecological problems started to be revealed and discussed, there was a focus primarily on the sheer numbers of people and theirpotentially negative impact on the earth. Ehrlich and colleagues stated: “In an agricultural or technological society [as distinguished from a hunter-gatherer society], each human individual, in the course of obtaining the requisites of existence, has a net negative impact on his environment.”(1)

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