It is 6 am and I am already awake. I am 45 years old and we are in the first day of 2050.

I am at home, most of the time. I never use a car and never eat meat. I live on the 15th floor
of a city centre tower from where I can just see the ocean 500 meters away on one side and
the suburbs on the other side.

Life is OK in this megacity. I earn a median income: I have no children, my carbon footprint is
very low, and my apartment, built in 2000, has been retrofitted for climate change with
deep insulation, its own solar air-conditioned and heating systems.

I have a “living” wall of plants and a balcony where I grow a few vegetables. Waste is
automatically sorted or composted. Outside it may be roasting, with temperatures often
higher than 40C. Inside, I am cool.

I love where I live, even though the water tastes slightly salty sometimes and there are often
electricity outages in the summer months because of the frequent droughts affecting
reservoir levels. My windows catch the breeze, and because the mayor has adapted to
climate change by banning cars across the whole city centre and no fossil fuels are burned
nearby, there’s little air pollution. I feel healthy.

Food is expensive because of the massive floods and droughts that have affected the
world’s main food-growing areas. Most of the food is organic and is delivered by drone.
Most cities of this size grow as much of their own food as possible these days, as a way to
reduce transport emissions.

 Artist’s impression of ‘farmscrapers’, designed by architect firm Vincent Callebaut.

Image: Solent News/REX/Shutterstock

To make extra money last year, I have traded in my annual government carbon and meat
quotas. Flights have been stopped anyway, and like everyone in my age, I am just allowed to
go on one return flight a year.
The city authorities are spending money at protecting infrastructure and helping people to
adapt to the higher temperatures and frequent storms. The green spaces have been re-
wilded. I can walk safely down the shady, tree-lined streets, cool off in the lido, or visit the
urban forest, which the far-sighted city mayor started 20 years ago on wasteland.

But now I am worried. I must adapt my own life as far as possible to climate change, but so
much is out of my control. The world’s population has grown by 2.5 billion people since
2020, and carbon concentrations reached the 550 ppm (parts per million) milestone last
year – just as the IPCC scientists had forecast they would. They were just 407 ppm in 2020.

Worst of all, the continuing loss of ice at the poles and in the great mountain ranges means
sea levels are rising faster than most would have believed possible 30 years ago. The last
great superstorm, caused by extraordinarily warm temperatures in the Arctic, flooded miles
of coastal settlements and forced the permanent evacuation of dozens of expensive ocean-
side apartment blocks. Waves crashed 100 meters beyond the new, higher sea walls. That’s
when my water started to taste salty.

Perhaps the time has come to sell up and migrate to higher land. I have been told that the
underground water supplies to my tower block are beginning to be polluted with seawater
and might only last 10 years. But it’s far worse in most parts of the city. There the extremely
poor don’t live in strong houses, and can’t build higher walls, relocate, borrow money or
adapt so easily.

 A view of a flooded lower Manhattan plaza after Hurricane Sandy left most of the
area without power in 2012, New York City, USA. Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA

But if I left, where would I go? Every year my apartment is worth less because it is so close
to the ocean; property on higher ground now attracts premium prices. My city has grown
vastly in the previous 20 years, as droughts and floods have made farming less profitable
and hundreds of thousands of climate-affected people have migrated in from rural areas.
Many of them live with only patchy public transport and endure dreadful air pollution and
heat.

This is the climate breakdown reality I was warned about at school. If I could go back in the
year 2020 and tell people how is our life in 2050, may I could change a lot of things… a lot of
people minds. HELP.
and why she skipped classes to join the great demonstrations of the 2030s. Back in October
2019, the C40 group of 94 global megacities had used IPCC and World Bank figures to
forecast that 1.6 billion people living in over 970 world cities would be regularly exposed to
extreme high temperatures by 2050.

It said another 800 million people living in 570 cities would be vulnerable to sea level rise
and coastal flooding, including the world’s great coastal cities. And it also said that 2.5
billion people (or nearly one in four people on Earth) would be living in the over 1,600 cities
where national food supplies were threatened by the climate crisis – including supposedly
richer cities such as Athens, Barcelona, Istanbul and Los Angeles. These predictions proved
to be accurate.

 Urban Forest Strategy and Precinct Plans by City of Melbourne, winner of an award
of excellence from the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects in 2016.
Photograph: City of Melbourne

Her city did its best to adapt, inspired perhaps by a report from the Coalition for Urban
Transitions, backed by some of the world’s leading economists, that showed that
governments that invested in low-carbon cities could not just help mitigate the effects of
the climate crisis but could also massively enhance economic prosperity, attract the most
talented people – and, not incidentally, make cities far better places to live.

Permanently cutting 90% of urban emissions in 2019 would have cost the world $1.8tn but
would have been generating annual returns of $7tn by now, it said.
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“Cities are engines of growth, innovation and prosperity,” António Guterres, then UN
secretary general, had said. “It is possible and realistic to realise net-zero emissions by 2050.
But to get there we will need the full engagement of city governments combined with
national action and support.”

Sadly, most governments did not pay much attention. It’s easy to be wise in retrospect, but
money spent then would have been the best investment ever made, she knows. Now the
figures seem conservative. Now it is a race against time.

How likely is this future?

By 2050, cities will be home to over 70% of the world population. The great global challenge
is to adapt them to the changing climate and reduce emissions.

That means conserving water, planting trees, banning fossil fuels, changing diets, adapting
farming, improving soils, reducing air pollution which contributes to warming, and even
painting buildings white to reflect heat.

Many north European cities have started to ditch diesel and petrol, ban cars and plastic and
turn to renewable power, aiming to be “carbon-zero”. Seoul is planting 30m trees and
expanding its green spaces vastly to create shade; Melbourne and many other Australian
and British cities will benefit from ambitious street tree-planting programmes. Denmark,
one of the most urban of all European countries, aims to cut emissions by 70% by 2030; its
capital, Copenhagen, aims to be carbon-neutral by 2025.
  Solar panels in Asmara, Eritrea: renewable power could help cities become carbon
zero. Photograph: Sfm Gm World/Alamy

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Many cities have less money or access to technology, but even those are developing
ambitious adaptation schemes. São Paulo is reducing emissions by paying people to use less
water and energy. Dar es Salaam and some cities in Canada are relocating people who live in
flood-vulnerable properties and pulling down their houses. Many cities have banned any
kind of building in wetland areas.

Some of the richest cities, such as New York, are planning huge ocean barriers to protect the
most valuable properties; others, such as London, are overhauling their drainage systems to
cope with greater populations and heavier rains.

In poorer countries such as Bangladesh, city mayors and governments have concentrated
on improving early warning systems and developing urban resilience. Mexico City has saved
power (and improved health) by installing thousands of rainwater harvesting and water-
purification systems.

 Illustration by Rebuild by Design in October 2017 for a flood-mitigation system for

Manhattan, New York.Image: AP

It’s not only a question of money. Those cities that start early in adapting for the climate
breakdown will be the most successful, says Saleemul Huq, director of the International
Centre for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Halfway to boiling: the city at 50C
 
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“Our long history of catastrophe gave us a head-start,” he says. “Bangladesh has one of the
best plans in the world for adaptation. Everyone is involved, from schoolchildren to urban
mayors and governments. Communities here are not waiting.

“The climate problem has indeed become a matter of urgency. This message is
reverberating among both the young and old generations around the world.”