London scoping - ukcip

Final Report
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6.4 Need for a Comparative Approach
The consequences of climate change in any one place are inextricably linked-up with climate
change impacts elsewhere. This is because of the interconnectedness of the flows of people,
money, resources, goods and services between different places. Hence, the potential impacts of
climate change in London are intertwined to some extent with the possible impacts in other
cities and regions. A comparative approach also has the advantage that it allows us an insight
into what the future climate change of London might be like in tangible terms, i.e. compared to
other present-day cities. Hence, by the 2050s London’s summer extreme would perhaps be
comparable with present-day Paris or Berlin, and to New York or Madrid by the 2080s. A
further use of such comparisons is that they help to identify potential adaptation strategies,
given that cities such as Madrid and New York already cope with temperatures anticipated to
occur in London in the 2050s to 2080s.
As the draft London Plan makes clear, the particular bundle of skills, services and activities in
the capital render it in many senses unique within the UK, so that the most appropriate
comparison is not with other UK cities, but instead other global cities which provide competing
services, in particular Tokyo and New York. Because Tokyo and New York are (to some extent
at least) serving needs in Asia and America, we should caution against assuming that trade can
readily be transferred between these cities. It might, therefore, be as useful to compare London
to, say, Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt and Brussels. Furthermore, we know that business often
depends upon long-established reputations and networks of knowledge and trust, and hence
business is generally not quite as footloose as might be imagined, particularly high-value added
work, where much of the skill is ‘intangible’ and hence not easily transferred.
A scenario approach also leads us to question the assumption that London would not face
competition from other cities in the UK. If, for instance, there is a strong shift towards regional
governance and devolution, then there could conceivably be a greater distribution of the finance,
business services, media, arts and culture activities, etc., currently concentrated in London. The
model for this is, perhaps, Germany, where Hamburg is lead city for media and publishing,
Frankfurt for finance, Berlin for administration, arts and culture, Munich for the automobile
industry, and so on. Germany shows that it is not impossible for such regional distinctions
which are globally competitive to emerge within a single nation. Even if we do not accept the
importance of the devolution and regionalisation agenda for London, a scenario approach is still
very helpful in providing a wider range of possible medium- and long-term futures.
The growth projections in the draft London Plan appear to be based on the very high growth
rates that London experienced in the 1990s. Assumptions about continued high economic
growth are also not at all guaranteed, merely because in the long-term past such growth has
always happened. As global inter-connectedness increases, the systems created to run our
countries and economies become ever more complicated. They may appear to become more
‘solid’ as they become more widespread and more sophisticated. According to theorists such as
Perrow and Beck (1992), however, such complex globally interconnected systems may actually
be more vulnerable to small disruptions at key points, because of their large knock-on effects,
than would be the case in a world with more localised self-sufficiency.
Table 6.2 provides some basic data to allow a comparison between London and the other cities
(Wright, 2002).