19.1: Localization and the Bioregional Transition

Localization is a development process that favors investment inside a particular locality for the benefit of that locality and the people, plus other life, living within it. In a localizing process that addresses climate change, efforts concentrate on identifying and enabling behavioral and physical changes needed to bring about more climate-friendly development. This includes carbon-neutral ways for people to collectively build, dwell, and adapt-in-place together.

Localization is a territorial process that generates place-based policies, plans, and activities. The aim is to create resource-conserving, waste-minimizing, and regenerative systems of production, consumption, distribution, and exchange. The number of organizations implementing localization strategies is growing. In the USA, the New Economy Working Group (a multipartner, action-oriented think tank) highlights the possibility and potential of localized living economies that support a healthy biosphere. Ecotrust, based in Portland, Oregon, operates an environmental bank, an ecosystem investment fund, and a range of programs in fisheries, forestry, food, farms, and Indigenous affairs. On a global scale, Bioneers, a group of social and scientific innovators, grows social capital by building local and bioregional and community-based alliances. The Bioregional Center for Sustainability Science, Planning and Design (based at UC San Diego) is doing civically engaged research and education focused on the transborder San Diego–Tijuana bioregion. The Bioregional Center works closely with the Global Action Research Center, known as the Global ARC. The Global ARC has a busy localization agenda linking research and action in community gardens, food forests, community composting, watershed protection, green infrastructure, and the establishment of a community-university partnership-led neighborhood environmental learning hub. The Global ARC’s food forest planted in an underserved, low-income community in Southeast San Diego has proven to be an especially good way to join concerns about climate and food systems. The definition and role of food forests in this context are described in more detail in Section 19.3.

The localization narrative now has a long list of tools and concepts (and yes, ample jargon) upon which to draw. Prominent examples include locavore, locavesting, slow foods, food justice, green infrastructure, adapting-in-place, eco-districts, biocapacity, ecological footprint, business alliance for local living economies (BALLE), local ownership and import substitution (LOIS), community-based natural resource management (CBNRM), relocalization, and reinhabitation.

Localization on the world stage

Global leaders and initiatives that are tasked to address climate change have begun to stress the importance of local engagement by actors that are jurisdictionally less comprehensive than an entire country (that is, nation-state). This includes subnational actors such as cities, counties, port districts, and metropolitan planning organizations. A clear example can be seen in the proceedings of the United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP). The COP is an annual meeting of nearly all the world’s nation-states and other organizations that formally come together to assess climate change efforts on the world stage.

The COP was established to track the degree to which nation-states worldwide are complying with the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). At the COP’s twenty-first annual meeting (COP21) held in Paris for 10 days in 2015, 195 nations reached a milestone agreement that has gotten a lot of media coverage. COP21’s Paris Agreement commits all of the participating parties (member states) to holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above preindustrial levels and to pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. This onehalf-degree difference is significant. Keeping the increase under 1.5°C improves our chances to avoid devastating climate change impacts.

Glocalizing commitments to reducing carbon emissions

COP21’s agenda and activities recognize that local and regional governments play a critical role in global climate action. The Climate Summit for Local Leaders that took place during COP21 produced a declaration by city and regional leaders from five continents announcing their cities’ and regions’ commitment to tackle climate disruption. Those who signed the Paris City Hall Declaration—including mayors, governors, premiers, and other local government leaders—committed to collectively deliver up to 3.7 gigatons of reduction in urban greenhouse gas emissions every year over the period 2015–2030. Meeting this goal would significantly help to close the gap between current national commitments and the 2°C emissions reduction pathway identified by the scientific community.

The Paris City Hall Declaration constitutes a promising case of glocalization—defined in the Encyclopedia Britannica as “linguistic merger of globalization and localization to describe processes that simultaneously exhibit both universalizing and particularizing tendencies in contemporary social, political, and economic systems.” The Paris City Hall Declaration draws attention to urban and regional networks worldwide, including the Compact of Mayors, the Covenant of Mayors, and the Compact of States and Regions. These glocal networking efforts are mobilizing commitments that specify local carbon and other GHG emission reduction targets for national and global benefit.

The Climate Summit of Local and Regional Leaders that took place at COP23 in 2017 culminated in a commitment by 1,019 local and regional governments from 86 countries, representing 804 million people, to reduce 5.6 gigatons of CO2 equivalent emissions by 2020 and 26.8 gigatons of CO2 equivalent emissions by 2050. COP24 held in Katowice Poland in 2018 concentrated on clarifying the details and protocols necessary to make the Paris Agreement operational. COP24 established a working group to support local and Indigenous communities in their efforts to strengthen Indigenous and local knowledge systems, enhance the engagement of local communities and Indigenous peoples in the UNFCCC, and process and integrate their considerations into climate change policy and action.

In addition to COP conferences where support for local and subnational solutions to climate change is rising, support for localization of this sort can also be seen in other global networking endeavors. More than 9,000 cities and local governments representing roughly 800 million people worldwide have joined the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy—a voluntary accord whereby cities can commit to make a low-carbon future one of their top priorities. Other examples include work coming out of the UN’s Habitat III, Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Catholic Church. Pope Francis wrote “On Care for Our Common Home,” a widely read encyclical letter focused on climate change as a moral issue, especially insofar as climate change disproportionately affects the world’s poor living in vulnerable cities and towns.

The new urban agenda and the bioregional transition

The globalization of local efforts to deal with climate change is a harbinger of what may be unfolding in some places as a bioregional transition. Organizations seeking integrated approaches to climate change have begun focusing world attention on urban-rural linkages and interdependencies. One of the top priorities listed on the Cities and Climate Change Science agenda produced during the forty-eighth IPCC meeting in 2018 is a clarion call for greater depth of understanding and commitment to improving holistic systems approaches to climate action planning. Specifically, the Cities and Climate Change Science agenda calls for more research to better understand the diverse interdependent links and resource flows throughout natural, built, and social systems and between urban areas and the rural hinterlands. This kind of research begins to look at bioregions as a useful territorial concept where urban, rural, natural, and working lands can be examined as interacting systems.

Bioregional solutions to climate change connect efforts in urban areas with related efforts and/or concerns in adjacent and nearby rural areas. Rural areas are made up of rural settlements, working lands, and waters (for example, farms, ranches, fisheries) and wildlands (natural and conserved spaces such as parks and forests). Bridging and improving urban-rural linkages is crucial if we ever hope to improve communication and public reasoning necessary to address climate change. This argument is well articulated globally in Habitat III’s New Urban Agenda.

The New Urban Agenda operationalizes Goal 11 of the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. Goal 11 aspires to make all cities and human settlements on Earth inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. The New Urban Agenda emphasizes the importance of the “urban-rural continuum.” This emphasis constitutes an important relational shift in perspective that sets aside the simplistic dualism of urban versus rural (the urban-rural binary). It may prove useful to view this shift as the beginnings of a bioregional transition in how we humans build and dwell together collectively on Earth.

Drivers of the bioregional transition

Figure 19.1.1 City lights at night. Reproduced from NASA.

Local and bioregional approaches to climate change benefit from globalized science and technology (for example, climate change modeling, transnational cyberinfrastructure, mapping, and data visualization technology). Science helps put things into perspective. NASA created a widely shared image showing Earth’s city lights from space (Figure 19.1.1). The city lights on the image show how urbanization tends to concentrate along coastlines. The United Nations reports that roughly 10% of the world’s population (at least 600 million people) live in coastal areas that are less than 10 meters above sea level. And approximately 40% of the world’s population (about 2.4 billion people) live within 100 km (60 miles) of the coast. This puts many people in harm’s way as sea level rises. And the global human population continues to grow rapidly.

The world’s human population in 2018 was 55% urban and 45% rural. The UN projects that the urban population will increase to 68% of the total by 2050. The sheer number of people involved is staggering. Between 2018 and 2050 an additional 2.5 billion people will populate the world’s cities. It is hard to grasp such magnitude. So, imagine this. The city of Los Angeles has roughly 4 million inhabitants. It is the largest city in California, and the second largest in the USA (behind New York City). Every single year, from 2018 to 2050, roughly 78,000,000 people will join the ranks of the world’s urban population. That translates into an annual population increase of about 20 LA-sized cities! This dramatic urban growth surge will take place mostly in Asia and Africa. The growth will include population increases from rural-to-urban migration. The growth will also stem from births within existing cities and the creation of new cities (perhaps most dramatically in China, where hundreds of new cities with more than a million inhabitants each are expected to populate the landscape). The Cities Alliance warns that meeting the infrastructure and construction needs of this urban population growth over the period from 2018 to 2050 may use up more than three-quarters of humanity’s global CO₂ budget if climate change is to be limited to less than 1.5°C. The institutional, economic, and societal stresses happening in the wake of rapid urbanization in many parts of the world where infrastructure and public services are inadequate is one of many factors motivating urban and regional planners to focus on urban-rural linkages from a bioregional perspective.

Figure 19.1.2 The bioregional transition. Illustration by Keith Pezzoli.

Figure 19.1.2 illustrates global and regional factors that may give rise to a bioregional transition in some places around the world. The drivers of the bioregional transition are multiple and complex, combining problematic stresses as well as opportunities, including (1) the intensification of climate change as global demand surges for meeting basic human needs such as food, water, energy, and dwelling space; (2) mounting institutional, economic, and societal tensions, including inequality; (3) culture change within universities where demand is rising for equitable, civically engaged research and education that is problem-solving and solutions oriented; and (4) disruptions good and bad happening in the wake of newly emerging modes of knowledge production, data science, multimedia communication, networking, and cyberinfrastructure.

Together these stresses, as well as opportunities, are stoking interest in localized, place-based solutions to climate change. The bioregion as a unit of analysis is gaining traction as a territorial framework to address urban-rural linkages. Bioregion as a term combines the Greek word for “life” (bios) with the Latin word for “territory” (regia) and the Latin term for “ruling/governing” (regere). Bioregion thus means “life territory or life place.” A bioregion is a region broadly defined by its physical, human-built, sociocultural, and economic attributes. The physical attributes of a bioregion include its geographic, ecological, and hydrological contours/systems giving shape to its landscapes and watersheds. Other physical attributes include climate, flora, fauna, soil, and water. The human-built attributes of a bioregion include the area’s infrastructures and human settlement patterns.

Bioregionalism is an action-oriented field of study focused on enabling human communities to live, work, eat, and recreate sustainably within Earth’s dynamic web of life. The bioregional approach to climate change solutions calls for establishing just, ethical, and ecologically resilient ways to (re)connect people with one another and with the land. Bioregionalism’s core commitments include (1) rebuilding urban and rural communities—at a human scale—to nurture a meaningful sense of place and to secure healthy attachments and rootedness among community inhabitants; (2) integrating nature and human settlements in ways that holistically instill eco-efficiency, equity, and green cultural values into systems of production, exchange, consumption, and daily life; (3) making known (and valuing) the way natural and working lands, ecosystems, and rural dwellers and resources enable cities to exist; (4) developing authentic community-based participatory processes that empower just and equitable civic engagement in local and regional planning, visualization, and decision-making; and (5) building global trans-bioregional alliances and knowledge networks to support sustainable place making around the world.

Bioregional ethics: local place-based attachments

Bioregional ethics begins with the following premise: Human beings are social animals. If we are to survive well as a species, we need sustainable human-nature relationships and healthy place-based attachments in ethical living arrangements with one another and with the land, waters, habitat, plants, and animals upon which we depend. Figuring out how to meet this need in socially just, ecologically regenerative, equitably inclusive, and climate-friendly ways is the paramount ethical as well as practical challenge of the twenty-first century. This is especially challenging, given how modern civilization’s globalized, hypermobile economy and large-scale migratory flows of people worldwide have made it increasingly difficult for people to form healthy place-based (rooted) attachments. Yet, stable, rooted attachments of this sort (including a sense of belonging to, and affection for, a particular place) are arguably necessary for societal well-being and environmental stewardship.

A rooted community is a community that identifies and supports aspects of social and political rights (for example, mutual aid, communitarianism, place-based attachment) that the liberal paradigm has neglected. Peter Marris provides us a wise suggestion in this regard: “Instead of thinking about social justice only in terms of the equal treatment of equivalent units, it acknowledges the right of each community of people to a familiar habitat, like creatures in the natural world. It recognizes the attachments which bind people to each other and to places, and out of which evolve the unique meaning of each person’s life.” Wendell Berry—a widely noted farmer-philosopher, poet and writer, conservationist, environmentally minded public intellectual—eloquently made the same point during his highly acclaimed Jefferson Lecture. Berry’s lecture, titled It All Turns on Affection, provides a strong moral and ethical critique of the presumption held by too many that cities can be improved by pillage of the countryside. Berry argues that we need to do a much better job understanding and valuing the multiple ways—ethically, culturally, economically, ecologically—that the fates of cities and towns are inextricably bound together.

There is a disconnect in how we arrange our urban and rural settlements and life support systems on Earth. For sure, resource-intensive industrialism worldwide has generated great wealth, even lifting millions of people out of extreme poverty. But it is also a highly uneven process that in many cases uproots people for lack of secure and stable connections to land and jobs. The relative abundance generated by globalized factory farming as an adjunct to industry has made it hard for many small-scale farms to survive. At the same time, many city people experience poverty and insecurity trying to meet their needs for food, water, and shelter.

The increasing volume of migratory flows of rural people—from degraded lands, expulsions, and lack of job opportunities—join the stream of urban migrants fleeing from violence in war-torn areas and from devastation caused by increasingly powerful storms and other mega-scale disasters, especially in coastal areas. These heavy migratory flows could eventually overwhelm existing legal and institutional systems designed to handle challenges posed by immigration and refugee needs. The prospect that “climigration” (migration forced by climate change) may get heavier increases this risk. What all of this points to is the need to transform how we go about urban and rural development.

Localization informed by a globally minded bioregional perspective is one way to address the daunting problems facing human civilization right now, including climate change. Localization can help us “connect the dots” linking cities, towns, infrastructure, and working lands that are bound together by geography, ecology, and culture. Identifying, understanding, implementing, and sharing local and bioregional solutions in the form of green infrastructure and natural climate solutions is a good start.