[{"jcr:title":"The City +2°C Program will be one of the highlights of the Laboratory in the year of COP 30","cq:tags_0":"area-de-conhecimento:políticas-públicas/sustentabilidade","cq:tags_1":"centro-de-conhecimento:laborat-rio-arq--futuro-de-cidades"},{"richText":"Extreme events, in Brazil and the rest of the world, challenge cities to adapt to the new environmental reality.","authorDate":"26/02/2025 19h40","author":"Leandro Steiw","madeBy":"Por","tag":"centro-de-conhecimento:laborat-rio-arq--futuro-de-cidades","title":"The City +2°C Program will be one of the highlights of the Laboratory in the year of COP 30","variant":"image"},{"jcr:title":"transparente - turquesa - vermelho"},{"themeName":"transparente - turquesa - vermelho"},{"containerType":"containerTwo"},{"jcr:title":"Grid Container Section","layout":"responsiveGrid"},{"jcr:title":"Flooding in the historical center of Porto Alegre","fileName":"Enchente centro histório Porto Alegre (shutterstock_2457837739.jpg).jpg","alt":"Enchente no centro histórico de Porto Alegre"},{"text":"  Only deniers do not accept it: the planet has been experiencing a series of increasingly frequent climate events that cause destruction and deaths. In the first months of 2025, summer rains flooded several capitals in the Southeast and Northeast regions of Brazil, while extreme temperatures were recorded in the South region. In São Paulo, two-thirds of the rain expected for the entire month of February fell in just two days. From 2013 to 2023, 4,300 Brazilian municipalities (about 78% of the total) recorded some type of climate disaster that affected the population, according to the Integrated Data System on Disasters (from the original, Sistema Integrado de Informações sobre Desastres - S2iD).   Moreover, these effects were felt not only in Brazil. In January of this year, rising average temperatures, reduced rainfall, higher wind speeds, and a prolonged drought created the conditions for wildfires in the state of California, in the United States, which killed 30 people and forced another 200,000 residents out of their homes. According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, approximately 16,000 residential and commercial structures were destroyed. The damage could reach $57 billion (R$330 billion). Also, cyclones and floods have killed hundreds of people in European countries. In October 2024, images of the destruction caused by rain in Valencia, Spain, were shocking — some Spanish regions recorded a year's worth of rain in just a few hours.   The impacts of global warming have been acknowledged for several decades, having culminated in the Paris Agreement. In 2015, the signatory countries of the agreement established the goal of keeping the increase in the global average temperature below 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels. To contribute to the urgent debate on mitigating the effects and adapting cities to new extreme temperatures, the Center for City Studies – Insper's Arq.Futuro Laboratory (from the original, Centro de Estudos das Cidades | Laboratório Arq.Futuro do Insper) is moving forward with the structuring of the City +2ºC Program (from the original, Programa Cidade +2ºC). The program will be one of the Laboratory's highlights in the year in which Brazil will host the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, COP 30, in Belém (PA).   According to Tomas Alvim, general coordinator of the Center for City Studies | Insper’s Arq.Futuro Laboratory, there are two central topics in the discussion about urban centers: security and climate change. “Any current reflection on the challenges of urban development necessarily involves these two axes,” says Alvim. “Security is a subject that we have been addressing in the Study Group Social Urban Planning and Public Security, which is already structured; as for climate change, we are organizing the City +2ºC Program. With those, we address these two transversal axes to all approaches to urban challenges that we will tackle in the Laboratory.”   There is another reason to be concerned about urban life, adds sociologist and professor Élcio Batista, coordinator of the City +2ºC Program. It is estimated that approximately 70% of the world’s population will live in cities by 2070. In Brazil, 85% already live in urban centers. “Cities are hubs of opportunities, services, knowledge, and the creation of prosperity and wealth. Therefore, they have an enormous capacity to attract people,” explains Batista. Given the context of climate change, this population concentration poses the challenge of making cities more resilient, adaptive, and sustainable, while keeping them attractive for the development of human beings in society.   A study by the Federal Government’s Civil House estimates that 8.9 million people live in areas of geohydrological risk in 1,942 Brazilian municipalities. One in four cities is located in areas susceptible to desertification, according to the Ministry of the Environment. These are some of the numbers that architect and urban planner Hannah Arcuschin Machado, deputy coordinator and lead researcher of City +2ºC Program, highlights to explain the scale and interconnection of the effects of climate change on the lives of the population.   The focus of the City +2ºC Program will be on the adaptations of these urban centers. “We understand that there is more knowledge produced on mitigating emissions that cause global warming than on adapting cities to withstand climate change in their various sectors,” says Hannah. “Mitigation is essential, but it is not enough. We also need to adapt, because the global warming scenario has already been established.”   Still, although there is progress in planning for adaptation, implementation is still insufficient in relation to the magnitude of climate risks, according to the Adaptation Gap Report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Hannah notes that there is a lack of data on the results and effectiveness of the implementation of adaptation measures. “This is a gap that the City +2ºC Program aims to address. Therefore, we will contribute to the production of knowledge aimed at strengthening the implementation of adaptation measures in the most strategic areas, which have a low-cost, high-benefit relationship, avoiding loss of life and economic resources, through the lens of climate justice,” says Hannah.   Thus, the City +2ºC Program provides research opportunities in mobility, housing, sanitation, green areas, finance, logistics, and energy, among other sectors. “Climate risks vary according to location. While some cities are susceptible to desertification, others are susceptible to flooding. There are also cities that are subject to both. In the Amazon, for example, the historical problem has been river flooding, but recently, we have seen very serious droughts. This is a layer of complexity for the adaptation research agenda, because the problem is more specific to that location,” says Hannah, also a PhD candidate in Environmental Science at the University of São Paulo.     Transversal model   For Batista, the current situation challenges the Laboratory to increase its capacity of producing knowledge about the impacts of global warming and generating predictive models that plan for scenarios in cities in a future with temperatures 2°C above average. The City +2ºC Program aims at promoting knowledge management; being able to prototype and test urban solutions; and building intersectoral coalitions between different levels of government, the public and private sectors, and the third sector. “Cities have become what they are today because of the human knowledge and capacity to explore nature in a way that is currently seen as unsustainable,” says Batista. “But it is precisely our capacity to learn, experiment, and innovate that will help us overcome this moment of crisis.”   The City +2ºC Program is being structured to operate transversally, integrating the five Study Groups (Architecture and the City; Urban Economy, Smart Cities, and Big Data; Housing, Real Estate, and Regulation; Urban Mobility; and Social Urban Planning and Public Security) and the two Initiatives (Women and Territories; and Urban Health) of the Laboratory. The coordinators hope to engage Insper professors and students in the activities. Batista says that an important aspect of the Program is the focus on the “how” part of the problems: how to adapt, how to transform, how to finance, how to measure, and how to innovate.   The expectation is that technical reports, policy papers, predictive models, digital tools, events with experts, and experimental programs and projects will be created. “Especially considering Brazil but also in parts of the world, this will be a great opportunity to employ the topic of climate adaptation to address the issue of social, economic, and spatial inequality in the territories,” says Batista, who was Chief Secretary of the Civil House of Ceará’s Government (2015-2020) and Deputy Mayor of Fortaleza (2021-2024). “Although we assume that extreme events affect everyone in the same way, the reality is quite different. The poorest populations tend to suffer greater damage due to the loss of assets and resources. The already deficient infrastructure and health, education, and social protection services in peripheral regions take longer to be restored, increasing inequalities.”   The corporate challenges are also immense. Extreme events have demobilized or rendered unviable several sanitation, agribusiness, industrial, and transportation operations. In Porto Alegre, Salgado Filho Airport was partially closed for five and a half months due to the historic flooding of May 2024. The state government estimated monthly losses of R$400 million to the state's economy. In Valencia, Spain, 4,500 companies lost facilities, equipment, machinery, and goods due to last year's floods. Companies will have to strategically rethink their future prospects in the face of similar events.   Cities have always faced adverse weather conditions. However, two conditions have worsened in recent years, Batista emphasizes: “The first is that the events that cities were used to experiencing, whether in an ordinary or extraordinary way, are now extreme and frequent. Normal floods have become major floods. In Fortaleza, for example, super-strong heat waves are capable of causing not only damage to the city's infrastructure, but also harming people's health, due to dehydration and heat stroke, with worsening of chronic diseases and even mental health problems. The second condition refers to some events that are new, completely extraordinary in our cities such as tornadoes in the south of Brazil, when we were used to rains involving strong winds. These two conditions are on the agenda for reflection.”   COP 30 will be held in November. As such, Batista sees an excellent opportunity for the City +2ºC Program to collaborate with data and analyses on the rapid urbanization process in Brazil in the 20th century, which accelerated from the 1950s onwards. “Some places will still go through this process of accelerated urbanization, like Africa, for example,” says Batista. “Over the last 40 years, it was Asia’s turn. India is going through this phase now. With COP 30 in Brazil, the City +2ºC Program can make a great contribution based on Brazilian experiences over the last century.”  "}]