By : Kashvi Jain
Published : 03/24/2021
Do you live in an urbanizing area? If you're wondering what urbanizing is, urbanizing a country is basically increasing the number of people who live in urban areas (towns, cities with infrastructure and good resources). Many times urban cities transform to urban slums (refer to image 1) and these are characterized as having poor conditions harming the environment, spreading pandemics, and causing climate change effects to maximize. Urbanization is both harmful and beneficial in a countless number of ways.
One of the harms is to the environment. Urbanization causes large amounts of air pollution. The National Geographic finds: intensive urban growth can lead to greater air pollution with significant impact on human health. More air pollution leads to death. Benedett quantifies that around 7 million die per year due to the effects of urbanization. This is very unfortunate because people move to urban cities to access better resources, but end up dying cause of the effects. Bourzac 19 finds specifically in West Africa, exposure to natural emissions has caused over 600,000 premature deaths. Babies are killed before they are even born causing many to lose their loved ones as a result.
Urbanization also causes pandemics and epidemics for two reasons. First is shanty towns. WHO confirms that Urban cities are very much overcrowded, have poor water and food supplies as well as infrastructure. Therefore serving for mosquito breeding sites. Due to urban settings, five large cities have already faced yellow fever epidemics. Second is habitat destruction. Liu 16 finds destructing habitats into infrastructure causes animals to be forced out of their houses and therefore spread zoonotic diseases. The World Health Organization’s models have predicted that such a pandemic or epidemic could kill almost 21 to 33 million people.
Urbanization also greatly accelerates climate change. Sham 17 finds: massive urban sprawling can bring about more deforestation, habitat destruction and greenhouse gas (GHG) or carbon emissions and therefore put more strain on the uses of natural resources. ECMWF 19 confirms that Climate simulations by the DACCIWA project team indicate that temperatures in West Africa are expected to increase by 1 to 3 degrees Celsius by 2050. Plumer 18 reports that just a 2 degree increase has resulted in over 400 million people worldwide experiencing water scarcity and 80 million people displaced due to flooding.
Last is food insecurity. Urbanization will worsen food insecurity for two reasons. First is population growth. According to Ekpenyong, a PhD candidate in Sociology, in 2015, as urbanization has increased, there has been a dramatic increase in the populations makes it difficult to provide food for all. The second reason is that urbanization worsens food security is because of the lack of access to healthy food in cities. Ekpenyong continues urban areas do not contain large food stores or areas where inhabitants can cheaply buy healthy foods. Even when urban people have access to food stands, the stands are not regulated, meaning that they do not have standard sanitation, refrigeration, or water resulting in the food being too harmful to consume. Worsening food insecurity can affect thousands of lives. According to Cyres, CEO of the Cyres group, in 2020, 760,000 people are at risk of dying of food insecurity which proves that urbanization is left unchecked. Clearly we can see urbanization is not what it seems to be!