Discovery Channel to air six episodes on future cities

BANGALORE - World’s leading non-fiction media firm Discovery Communications — through its popular Discovery Channel — will telecast across India from Nov 22 six episodes on how future cities will be, a company official Thursday said.

Titled “Ecopolis”, the six-part episode will provide a realistic look at problems and solutions that will unfold in a futuristic mega city, as nearly 75 percent of the global population are projected to live in urban areas.

“The documentary hosted by Nobel Prize-winning scientist Daniel Kammen is a blueprint for a future city to test new technologies that could reshape the environmental circumstances of mega-cities in the second half of this century,” Discovery Networks Asia-Pacific vice-president Rahul Johri told reporters here at a preview of the episode.

The series takes a look at key data and model experts have come up with for urban life in 2050, with all its complications and problems to derive at technical solutions that will ensure a sustainable urban experience in the future.

“Citizens of sprawling, ever-growing metropolises might exhaust resources like food, water and energy at a rate beyond our estimation. Such mass consumption could result in a large carbon footprint, generate large amounts of waste, which could speed up global warming and pollute cities to the point that each becomes almost unliveable,” Johri said.

Based on an innovative format, each episode investigates different visionary and technology-driven solutions to specific future mega-city challenges, such as how to produce enough food and water; find clean and reliable energy sources; reduce our reliance on oil for transportation; discover new ways to manage waste and increase the energy efficiency of city buildings.

“Ecopolis is a realistic vision of what our cities might be like by 2050. These mega cities might be dirty, polluted, running out of food, water and fuel and prone to blackouts,” Johri noted, adding that inventive technologies, however, have the ability to change the future.

The episodes, to be aired every Monday at 9 p.m. from Nov 22, will be repeated every Thursday at 10 a.m.