How do urbanization and rural development impact communities differently? How can we make public policy and enlightened self-interest advance climate action?
Dr. Shiv Someshwar is a Development Clinician, diagnosing development of cities and nation states. A Visiting Professor at Columbia University, New York and at Sciences Po, Paris, he was the founder chair-holder of the European Chair for Sustainable Development and Climate Transition at Sciences Po. He helped set up the initial national and regional networks of the global Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
His publications cover a range of issues: planning, institutions and governance of sustainable development; climate change mitigation, adaptation, risks and offsets; and ecosystem management. He edited Re-living the Memories of an Indian forester: Memoirs of S. Shyam Sunder and is presently writing The Fallacy of Evidence-Based Policy Making.
He convened and chaired the Independent Task Force on Creative Climate Action. Dr. Someshwar received a Ph.D. in urban planning from the University of California, Los Angeles, and he was a Bell-MacArthur fellow at Harvard University. He has two masters’ degrees, on housing and on environmental planning, and is also trained as a professional architect. He has previously worked at the Earth Institute, Columbia University, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, and the World Bank in Washington D.C.
DR. SHIV SOMESHWAR
My area of work is sustainable development with a focus on climate. And you can ask what does sustainable development mean? To put it very simply, it means how do you have economic growth that is socially equitable and environmentally sustainable? It's not just that you have ecological sustainability; hence, that is sustainable development.
Because lots of examples of economic, ecological, and ecologically sensitive growth need not be socially equitable. That's why this whole emphasis on just transition is not just about climate, but it's also about justice. It's about social equity in economic growth. Unlike in Europe, where there is now the call for degrowth or a circular economy, most parts of the world would look at you blankly if you talked about degrowth because they are hungry for growth.
And so sustainable development is about managing these trade-offs, which is what I've been working on. My work is really focused on institutions, and how do you bring the best of science into development. And for me, development is also spatially informed. It's not just the statistical averages, but it's spatially informed because you have people living in cities, villages, and homesteads. So, how do you become geographically sensitive in your policymaking? And that comes from my own background in planning and architecture.
The Future of Climate-Smart Cities
Let me start by saying what we should not be looking at, which, unfortunately, a lot of well-informed development agencies are – and they call it climate-proofing cities. That is a mistake because you cannot climate-proof anything. And it also gives the population and policymakers a wrong sense. The correct term is climate-smart. So how do you get climate-smart? It's not easy.
And a key question I always ask my students is when people use the term stakeholders. That's like a throwaway term. Oh, we need to get all the stakeholders around the table. Okay, what stake do they hold? What stake does a civil society leader hold? What does a community member hold? Don't assume that they're holding a certain interest in their minds. Make that clear.
Re-living the Memories of an Indian Forester, that's my father's memoir. He passed away from COVID-19 a few years ago. He was an outstanding forester. Outstanding in the sense of technically, really, really good. Administratively, really good. Super honest. These three qualities served him well, which I believe now are more difficult to find.
It was really a neat way of trying to tell you, the current generation, especially the youngsters, how managing forests is not just black-and-white. It's not that the governments and the state are this kind of "evil", and then you have NGOs and communities, who are this kind of "goody two shoes". And how it's in the gray areas that you can actually make the most effective forest management. How do you actually bring the best of both? Because now we are so careless in the way we approach things we think we understand. And we're dismissive. We are quick to judgment. And that's one thing that I hope that in my class and the current generation really needs to be far more reflective. And not just because something doesn't gel with what they think is the right thing, is the just thing. They can't just dismiss it out of hand.
Silver Bullets · Scaling Up & Climate Solutions
I'm kind of concerned when people put the promise on silver bullets of regenerative agriculture or growing a trillion trees or sucking carbon through CCS technologies. Because what happens then is people take comfort that there is a practice or a technology around the corner. Hydrogen is another one. Fusion energy is yet another. And I think we need to be going kind of full throttle on all of those, but at the same time, that doesn't mean that we give up on mitigation or we give up on climate risk management, which I think is technically the correct term to say, rather than adaptation. How do you manage the risk of a changing climate? How do you then emit less and basically get fossil fuel out of your system? And that again is long-term. It's not for the next five to ten years. So, when you have these kinds of promises, invariably the market signal is aha. So now, we don't really need to do much on mitigation because something is there around the corner, whether it's regenerative agriculture, which holds enormous promise, or through reforestation, green hydrogen. We're not anywhere close to scaling up, and some of them really have deep technological challenges.
The Role of Institutions in Climate Change Mitigation
So, geoengineering has its champions, and there are people who say we shouldn't be doing anything, but I think we cannot foreclose any options because, as you said a few minutes ago, how far are we from 1.5 or even 2 degrees of change? I think we really need to have work done on all of these things, but when it comes to applying them, we need to be far more prudent and be far more effective with our institutions. It can't just be that we use the same existing institutions because they may not be fit for purpose when it comes to these kinds of institutions. Just on that note, many people fault the United Nations. They say, oh, it's a useless kind of organization. They can't really take action. But actually, that's by design. The UN was never meant to take some of these actions because they are at the behest of member states. And if a single member state says, "No, we can't. We don't want you to do this." They're stuck, right? And so, in some sense, it's unfair to blame a system that's not been designed to advance the public good other than through means of communicating the right things and exhorting the policymakers to do the right thing.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
What would you like young people to know, preserve and remember?
SOMESHWAR
Now, we are so careless in the way we approach things we think we understand. And we're dismissive. We are quick to judgment. And that's one thing that I hope in my class and the current generation really needs to be far more reflective. Read and discuss widely. Especially read those things that you disagree with. And then ask yourself why. Why are you having this reaction? Why this negative emotion? Go to the heart of why you think you disagree with this. It enables the young to become better communicators. You need to be open to being questioned. You don't outshout the questioner. You really need to be able to answer these uncomfortable questions, and that's the way of persuasion. And, of course, you have power dynamics over which you have no control, especially when you're young. And that's something they really need to figure out. How does one work in a situation of power and powerlessness? But there is no substitute for knowing.
