Effects Of Urbanization

Mega-Cities: Opportunities and Threats - WomenCorporateDirectors Explores ...

"This demographic shift is a key mega-trend for global business," said , co-founder and global co-chair of WomenCorporateDirectors . "Directors at companies around the world must understand both the risks and the opportunities in this new breed of cities."

Urbanization and its impact on business was a topic explored by participants at the first-ever WomenCorporateDirectors Global Institute this spring. In a panel moderated by , deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal , experts looked at the challenges accompanying the trend and how the new breed of cities will affect the way companies conduct business in and with these markets.

'Feral' cities supplanting states as economic forces

" With the phenomenon of mega-cities exploding, particularly in the developing world, some cities now consume more than their states can provide ," said , a former director of China Construction Bank . "In 20 years, over 220 Chinese cities will have populations of over a million; there will be 23 cities over five million and several over 20 million, and the Chinese are even studying the feasibility of cities of over 40 million. Will public sector funding and political institutions be able to keep pace? Will they provide the necessary public services to assure continued social stability and relatively full employment that are the primary goals of the Chinese government?"

As urban centers develop a stronger field of gravity within their countries, " maybe we don't need a G20 of nations anymore – maybe we need a G20 of cities ," said Annette Schommel, founder of Arthesia and director of Kuoni Reisen Holding . "I'm not so sure that the U.K. will be a member of the G20 in ten years, but I'm pretty sure that will still be a mega-city even 50 years from now."

"A failure of capacity"

The rise of big cities brings with it significant challenges, said the panelists – from providing enough energy, transportation, and food, to creating a safe and secure environment in which business can operate.

ANTHROPHYSIS: Exeter Monday: Effects of urbanization on avian ...

More than half the people on Earth live in urban areas, and urban land is the most rapidly growing land cover type in the world. There are measurable differences between urban areas and neighboring land, including temperature, length of plant growing season, seasonality of food abundance, type and number of predator, and composition and structure of wildlife populations. As a result of these environmental differences, organisms that live in urban populations often have noticeably different physical characteristics. In birds, for instance, researchers have measured variations in plumage color, communication, stress levels, diet, blood biochemistry (e.g., cholesterol), size and shape, and migratory tendency. These can all have significant impacts on the health and success of individuals, which, in turn, can have broader-scale impacts--for instance, on the food web or on ecosystem function. Generally, differences between urban and rural populations have been conducted over relatively small scales, incorporating just a small portion of a species' entire range--for instance, urban and rural birds in a single city. In order to investigate how widespread these urban-rural dichotomies are, collaborators from the University of Sheffield, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Exeter's Cornwall Campus, conducted a large-scale study across Europe. They sampled 651 common blackbirds ( ) during the 2006 and 2007 breeding seasons. The blackbirds came from 11 paired and urban rural breeding populations across nearly the whole of the blackbirds' range: Tunis, Tunisia; Valencia, Spain; Madrid, Spain; Berlin, Germany; Groningen, Holland; Prague, Czech Republic; Krakow, Poland; Sheffield, England; Szczecin, Poland; Riga, Latvia; and Tallinn, Estonia. They also measured birds at an additional rural site in Montpellier, France. At each site, they measured wing length, length of the long leg bone (the tarsus), bill length, bill depth, and body mass. This allowed them to investigate whether there are consistent differences between urban and rural areas. Further, because they knew when blackbirds had first colonized each of the urban environments, they were also able to determine whether the degree of morphological difference (if any) was related to the length of time during which the birds had lived in urban environments.

Effects of urbanization

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Impact of human activity on groundwater dynamics, proceedings of an international symposium (Symposium S3) held during the Sixth Scientific Assembly of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) at Maastricht, The Netherlands, from 18 to 27 July 2001