Republic of Côte d'Ivoire Urbanization Review
Chapter 3: Greening Cities
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- These impacts can be mitigated with coordinated, forward-looking, and context-specific decisions.
- For Global Connectors, greening can improve competitiveness and productivity.
- For Regional Connectors, green policies can be aligned with the bigger priority to support growth through regional trade and transport.
- International experience indicates that there are opportunities to reduce the environmental footprint and improve the economic efficiency of light manufacturing
- For Domestic Connector cities, establishing greener growth patterns will stimulate localization economies.
- The national government also has a vital role to play in enabling greener urban development across cities, as this is too great a burden for city governments alone.
Chapter 3: Greening CitiesFailures in infrastructure and coordination deepen Côte d’Ivoire’s urban pollution and its vulnerability to natural disasters. The cities severely lack basic sanitation, solid waste management, and storm water infrastructure, so that untreated water from industry and households is disposed directly into urban and coastal water bodies. Inadequate storm water drainage and poor solid waste management mean that cities flood easily—exacerbating problems from extreme weather events and washing additional pollutants into lakes, lagoons, and the ocean. As transport motorizes, inefficiencies are leading to rising per capita emissions, while green spaces in and around cities—which help filter pollutants and absorb flood water—are disappearing through lack of green management. These impacts can be mitigated with coordinated, forward-looking, and context-specific decisions. Thinking about “green cities” does not require any new paradigm. Greening should not impose large new costs on urban development at the expense of other social and economic goals. It is about building understanding of existing costs into decision-making, and taking coordinated and contextual actions to promote sustainable development. In Côte d’Ivoire, priority greening initiatives are those that help address key development challenges throughout the system of cities. They are initiatives that will help cities, individually, anticipate future costs of today’s decisions, leading to efficiency gains and building resilience to environmental risks. For Global Connectors, greening can improve competitiveness and productivity. The economy of Abidjan and other Global Connectors is based on international trade, innovation, and productivity. High rates of urban pollution threaten their quality of life, making them unattractive to high-skilled labor and undermining productivity. Coastal cities are also particularly vulnerable to natural disasters, such as flooding associated with sea-level rise. Greening initiatives potentially offer myriad solutions to these challenges. As this chapter highlights, integrated planning to upgrade basic infrastructure in Abidjan’s 144 precarious settlements can result in a triple win of social, economic, and environmental benefits. Protection of green and open spaces along the waterfront can make the city more attractive and livable, while providing a vital buffer against climate change–related risks. Further, coordinated efforts to provide a system of public, non-motorized transport can help stem rising congestion and air pollution, while providing a wide range of social and economic advantages. For Regional Connectors, green policies can be aligned with the bigger priority to support growth through regional trade and transport. The economy of the Regional Connectors is grounded in regional trade related to extractive industries and small manufacturing. As highlighted in this chapter, a fuller understanding of the environmental costs and tradeoffs associated with these activities is important to ensure more efficient use of resources, which will help cities plan ahead. It will also help cities save in the long run by building, into infrastructure investment, resilience to environmental risks: for example, roads should be designed to withstand landslides, coastal erosion, and heavy rains to prevent waste of public investment. International experience indicates that there are opportunities to reduce the environmental footprint and improve the economic efficiency of light manufacturing, often at industrial zones where economies of scale can be attained in pollution-treatment infrastructure. The government has already identified the economic and social gains of better regulated and modernized freight transport, which could help minimize the environmental costs of trucking. The natural beauty and ecological uniqueness of regions such as Man present underexploited economic opportunities, in a context where ecotourism is the fastest-growing area of the tourism industry90 and is an important area for growth in green jobs.91 For Domestic Connector cities, establishing greener growth patterns will stimulate localization economies. Domestic Connector cities are important in the system of cities and national economy, as they connect agricultural inputs and outputs to markets. These cities need to get basic services right from the outset to support more sustainable growth patterns. Planning can greatly reduce the long-term costs of urban development by laying the foundation for basic service infrastructure such as sewage systems and roads (chapter 1). This can help insulate small cities from unnecessary future costs, such as those now faced by larger cities like Abidjan, where, for example, due to the physical layout of the city 40 percent of houses cannot be reached by solid-waste collection trucks. Domestic Connector cities can also explore alternative technologies to potentially reduce costs for basic services, as smaller cities in Kenya are doing, by exploring off-grid photovoltaic street lighting. The national government also has a vital role to play in enabling greener urban development across cities, as this is too great a burden for city governments alone. The central authorities can provide information and create incentives to change behavior and support more efficient, sustainable development. Policy makers and consumers require better information on the environmental costs of their decisions. The government can ensure that this information is collected and disseminated, for example by establishing reporting standards for firms, monitoring national data on water and air quality, and supporting cities in measuring urban indicators that help urban households, businesses, and policy makers better consider future costs and challenges in their decision-making today. It can also educate through schools. It can provide incentives by creating regulations and using price instruments to stimulate behavior change among firms and households. Although the effect of such measures is hard to predict, international experience with fuel standards and vehicle-upgrading programs suggests that important transformations can occur through a well-designed and integrated system. 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