Sustainable Bristol

Dreaming of Environmental Sustainability in Bristol City-Region

Posted on 02 June 2010

Matthew Taylor, PhD researcher into the Environmental Sustainability of the Bristol City-Region, dreams of the future from his Totterdown window.

2010: The orange streetlit glow of the City of Bristol, viewed from the suburb of Totterdown on a cold and wintry January evening. Lighting, courtesy of electricity mass-generated from the combustion of coal, nuclear fission of uranium and the combustion of natural gas (methane). Inhabitants kept warm predominantly from on-site combustion of natural gas. Their food, water, medicine, cosmetics, clothes, furnishings and consumer goods have been produced,  processed and/or transported through the use of various products of crude oil.

Now jump forward to 2050: This scene could look fairly similar or vastly different – the reality depends on a range of physical and political factors, the most compelling of which are likely to centre around the availability of crude oil fuel products.

The best cases being that either technological innovation has provided sufficiently abundant alternatives to oil and other fossil fuels to enable a continued global socio-economic existence, or that no convenient oil equivalent has been found but society has had enough time to adapt to a more localised, energy efficient way of life before oil is completely depleted. The worst case scenario on the other hand is that the oil decline is swift, climate change is increasingly destructive, planning has been inadequate, the market economy has effectively collapsed and no usable infrastructure exists to meet basic human needs.

It is within this context that the concept of environmental sustainability is being approached in my research. Food and warmth along with clean water and sanitation are essential for basic human needs. If technological innovation is unable to provide a suitable clean, abundant, mobile energy source capable of replacing liquid fossil fuels, then it is highly likely that food, fuel and products formerly imported using such energy will need to be produced locally. Therefore the local land surrounding Bristol City – that constituting the city-region county formerly known as Avon - would need to be relied upon to sustain the population with food, fuel, timber and minerals indefinitely. Environmental sustainability would be as crucial as it was before the industrial revolution.

This extreme re-localisation scenario could be viewed as one side of a future socio-economic scenario polemic relating to human scale. At the other end of this polemic is the technological innovation scenario, whereby a combination of efficiency measures and new technologies (such as nuclear fusion) has enabled the global economic system to continue. For this latter scenario still to be sustainable ‘indefinitely’, limits on consumption and high standards of environmental management would be required to ensure ecosystems globally are able to cope with resource demand and waste assimilation (pollution) and that non-renewable resources are not wasted, are recycled and are used sparingly.

Between these two poles lies a continuum of potential socio-economic sustainable lifestyles. As these two poles represent two very spatially different economic modes of activity, a study of the environmental sustainability of the Bristol city-region requires examination of both spatial scales in its methodology – the local and the global.

The design for my research has therefore been modelled to assess the quality and quantity of local natural resources to capture the local spatial scale of environmental sustainability from a ‘bioregional’ carrying capacity perspective, as well as to examine the flows of materials and energy into and out of the city-region to assess whether its ‘industrial metabolism’ is environmentally sustainable in a global context. The extent to which the city-region could be self-sustainable at defined levels of resource consumption and population can then be calculated, pressures causing negative impacts locally and globally examined, and future trends based on a ‘business as usual’ scenario predicted.

The second half of the research will be to examine several future scenarios in more detail. Much future scenarios visioning has been undertaken already for the Bristol City-Region, which will be drawn upon with reference to the human scale scenario model. An examination of how these visions can be achieved and at what pace would then be examined using backcasting from the year 2050, whilst at the same time factoring in natural resource depletion rates, rate of climate change and socio-political factors.

The research will be of help to those who are making valuable steps towards planning for a very different energy future than we have known over the last century.

You can read the full version of Matt’s journal article “Measuring the Environmental Sustainability of the Bristol City-Region: Current and Potential Scenarios” here.