Professor Karen Seto, Coordinating Lead Author for the IPCC Working Group III's new chapter on Human Settlements, Infrastructure, and Spatial Planning presents a short synopses of its contents. She reviews the three key messages of the 5th Annual Assessment, and the six key messages of the new chapter that she worked five years to bring to fruition.
With world population poised to grow to 9 billion people, the good news she says is that most of the infrastructure they will need has yet to be built, offering great opportunities for potential energy savings. Particularly in Asia, she says "the opportunity is to avoid the infrastructure lock-in, to avoid the behavior lock-in, that we see in high-energy consuming societies."
Professor Seto is an established leader in the area of urbanization and global environmental change. She is Co-Chair of the Urbanization and Global Environmental Change Project (UGEC) of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP). She also serves on the National Research Council Committee to the Advise the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), the National Research Council Geographical Sciences Committee, the National Research Council Committee on Needs and Research Requirements for Land-Change Modeling, and the U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Steering Group.
The title of this presentation is "The IPCC's New Chapter on Urbanization"
