LONDON, Dec. 2 (UPI) -- Planners must start now to design transport infrastructures for a world where two-thirds of the Earth's population will live in cities, a U.K. think tank says.
A report by Forum for the Future says authorities must begin to plan now in order to create easier and more sustainable ways of accessing goods and services to prevent future megacities from becoming dysfunctional and unpleasant places to live, The Guardian reported Thursday.
By 2040, the world's urban population is expected to have grown from 3.5 billion to 5.6 billion, the report says.
"If we go on with business as usual, what happens is unmanageable levels of congestion because personal car ownership has proliferated," Ivana Gazibara, author of the report "Megacities on the Move" says.
"Cities could be a pretty nasty place to live for the two-thirds of the global population in the next 30 years if we don't act on things like climate change mitigation and adaptation, smarter use of resources and sorting out big systemic things like urban mobility," she says.
City authorities needed to start taking the issues more seriously, Gazibara says.
"[There are] far too many places where cities that are acknowledging climate change as a threat continue to build more roads, continue to provide incentives to more car ownership and more driving," she says. "That's something that will fundamentally need to change."
