London scoping - ukcip

Final Report
95
6. The Potential Social Impacts of Climate
Change in London
6.1 Introduction
London is a large and complex city which has persisted as the dominant, and by far the largest,
city within England, and more widely in the UK. For many hundreds of years over 10% of
England’s population have dwelt in London and its role in the national economy has always
been pivotal, if sometimes controversial. Culturally, London is far more diverse than other UK
cities, and has a higher percentage of Black and Minority Ethnic residents than anywhere else,
at 27% of the population (compared to national average 7% and the next highest region at 10%).
Arguably, social and cultural integration has advanced further in the capital than elsewhere. On
average 4,550 people live in each square kilometre of London, over twice the population density
found in most UK cities; within the European Union only Paris and Brussels are more densely
populated. There are acute housing and office space shortage and rising housing and land costs.
Large building programs are required to meet the latent and growing demand (500,000 houses
over the next fifteen years) since Londoners are starting to live in smaller family units or by
themselves: the number of households is growing at a faster rate than the population overall.
Nearly half of the Greater London workforce (48%) is classified as ‘professional’ or
‘managerial and technical’, compared to a national average of 38% in these two categories
(ONS 2001). Per capita, Londoners also have higher incomes than elsewhere in the UK.
(Compared to a UK average of 100, London’s per capita GDP score is 128.5, whilst the North
East is 83.9 and the West Midlands 91.8 for example) (ONS 2001). These higher-than-UKaverage
incomes, however, mask a very unequal distribution of incomes in London (GLA
2002a). The disparities in income are significantly higher in London than elsewhere in the UK,
with unusually high incomes at the top end of the distribution and a greater proportion that the
UK average in lower income brackets. One in five households have a weekly income of less
than £150, in a city with the highest property prices in the UK (average property price
£205,850). Five of the ten (and 13 of the 20) most deprived districts in England are in London.
Unemployment is higher amongst the Black and Minority Ethnic than the white community (at
13.5% compared to 5.1%). The Bangladeshi community has a particularly high unemployment
rate, followed by the Black African and Black Caribbean communities (LHC 2002).
Within this context, climate change will have both direct and indirect impacts on the social
aspects of London life. We have used the following definition of ‘social’ and attempt in this
section to bring discussion back to how these aspects of London life would be affected by
climate change:
“overall health and well-being, social and economic equity, public safety,
public health and infrastructure, civil cultural and political society (including
political institutions), and who bears the costs and reaps the benefits in a future
London.”
Most assessments of climate change in the literature have focussed on either the physical world,
such as on biodiversity, or on the physical aspects of human systems such as crop production