The World Coal Association’s latest edition of Cornerstone published a report by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs’ Population Division chief of branch Barney Cohen which echoed analysis on the rise of mega-cities recently by Woodside CEO Peter Coleman at APPEA 2015 in May.

While Coleman’s reference to megacities was to highlight the changing nature of customer relationships and challenge industry to think outside the square to foresee emerging trends before it’s too late, it turns out he was spot on.

“The model is changing for us and the way we finance is changing for us, and that means the customer relationships are fundamentally changing – we’re going from national oil companies to megacities,” Coleman told APPEA 2015.

“The future will be: we will be dealing with megacities. Shanghai will be a megacity. China will have 45 megacities by 2025-2030.

“So we’re into a point where we’re no longer talking traditional customers. We will no longer have traditional pricing formulas.

Cohen said the world was projected to experience not only an increase in the absolute number of large cities, but that the largest cities were projected to reach “unprecedented” sizes.

“Mega-cities, conventionally defined to be large urban agglomerations of 10 million or more, have become both more numerous and considerably larger in size,” Cohen said.

In 1990, there were 10 such mega-cities, containing 153 million people. By 2014, the number of mega-cities had nearly tripled to 28, and the population that they contain had grown to 453 million inhabitants, accounting for roughly 12% of the world’s urban dwellers.

While Tokyo, currently the world’s largest urban agglomeration with 38 million inhabitants, has grown at an annual rate of roughly 0.6% over the last five years, other mega-cities such as Delhi (with 25 million residents) and Shanghai (with 23 million) have been growing at more than 3% per annum over recent years.

Cohen said such rapid growth was creating challenges for local authorities charged with delivering essential services.

Rounding out the list of the top 10 largest urban agglomerations are Mexico City, Mumbai, and Sao Paulo, each with around 21 million, Osaka with just over 20 million, Beijing with slightly under 20 million, and New York- Newark and Cairo, each with around 18.5 million inhabitants.

The point of Cohen’s deluge of data about the rise of megacities is that cities have become the principal venue for attempting to achieve the goals and targets of the new development agenda.

“Consequently, one of the central challenges over the next 15 years is finding means to take full advantage of the potential benefits of urbanisation and city growth in ways that lessen the obvious potential negatives,” Cohen said.

In designing the new post-2015 development agenda, Cohen said the UN’s member states needed to ensure that efforts to improve the quality of life of the present generation were “far-reaching, broad and inclusive, but do not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.

“Accomplishing these ambitious goals will depend on identifying strategies to expand access to resources for growing numbers of people, eradicate poverty, increase standards of living, reduce unsustainable patterns of consumption and production, and safeguard the environment,” Cohen said.

“The realisation by the international community that, alongside poverty reduction, environmental objectives must feature more prominently in any new list of global goals and targets suggests that attention to issues of energy use and energy efficiency are likely to attract much more attention than ever before.

“Continued urban population growth combined with rising standards of living suggests that energy use and greenhouse gas emissions will be much higher in the future, unless there is concerted action to reduce them.

“Therefore, one essential element of the new sustainable development agenda will be to encourage local authorities to invest in new cleaner energy infrastructure relying on high-efficiency, low-emissions fossil-fuel technologies and utilise new technologies that take advantage of alternative energy sources.”