How do you reduce a city to a score? It’s hard enough for judges when ranking freestyle snowboarders or the best takeout Thai food. With cities, the task is inherently more complex, but it’s pressingly relevant to try since more than half of humanity depends on a city for health, safety and prosperity. And the UN projects that more than two-thirds of us will live in cities by 2050, the same year we need to achieve net-zero.

I’ve attended the Federation of Canadian Municipalities conference on sustainable communities for more than a decade, first as a city councillor, then as mayor, and now as an advisor on climate investing and community resilience. After years of relentless focus on climate change mitigation through decarbonization, creating resilience to the changes that are already upon us took centre stage at this year’s conference. This was also true at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt in November, where a central thrust was negotiating what’s called loss-and-damage funding for the Global South based on the devastating impacts of historic emissions from the Global North on many of the world’s poorest cities.

This might be the last stage of grief (acceptance) or the first step in acknowledging the true scale of the problem.

This is not to say for a minute that we should relent on decarbonization – far from it. If anything, the devastating floods in Pakistan and California over the last year should amplify our resolve to hold warming to the minimum possible scope of devastation while simultaneously increasing resilience to those rising risks, whatever their final apex.

This is the point, and it’s a relentless but critical one: we need to address all facets of resilience and sustainability in parallel. We don’t just have to build the plane while we’re flying it; we have to learn to soft-land it too – an inherently interrelated and complex set of tasks.

Indeed, cities are arguably the most complex systems humans have yet engineered for ourselves. The vast networks of hard infrastructure alone are boggling if you stop to think about them, much less the extraordinary diversity of human activity found in the hive of structures, streets and open spaces. Add in the watersheds, airsheds and ecosystems that many forget are under, around and throughout our cities, and the beautiful complexity of urban systems begins to resolve.

While each city has its unique context, history, geography and culture, there are some features that are more easily comparable, such as water use and air quality. These hard factors are so important to our index that having the best score on particulate air pollution in the entire Corporate Knights database launched Winnipeg into top position among Canadian cities and ninth overall. A strong showing for the city’s first year included in the index.

However we measure sustainability, some cities tend to come out consistently at the top based on all-around excellence. Despite adding 20 more cities to the 2023 Sustainable Cities Index, the top five cities did not change position from the 2022 ranking: Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, Lahti and London, indicating strong consistency in their performance and robustness in the ranking methodology.

The three Scandinavian cities at the top each take best in show in at least one sustainability KPI (key performance indicator). Stockholm ranks highest on Scope 1 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions thanks to longstanding decarbonization policies, extensive public transit and a strong tradition of well-built buildings fed from co-generating district energy systems. The Swedish capital also received top scores on open public space, the lowest automobile dependence and best solid waste avoidance in the index.

READ MORE: These circular cities want to send landfills to the trash bin of history

Oslo ranks highest on climate resilience for its green roofs and climate-anticipatory stormwater strategies while also maintaining the best water access among all ranked cities, as well as strong electrification progress, from cars to construction. Copenhagen, meanwhile, has the strongest results on water consumption. It is worth asking ourselves what is in that proverbial water in these Nordic communities that engenders such a strong commitment to systems-level approaches to sustainability and how can the rest of us emulate it?

In addition to the hard measures of emissions and the data about transportation systems, we can also test for an appreciation of complexity by looking at cities’ sustainability policies. Sydney, Australia (seventh place), or example, engaged very actively in the survey this year and was able to move up 19 positions from its rank last year by showing it has robust sustainability policies, coming up right below Oceania leader Auckland (sixth), with their best-in-region climate adaptation and resilience policies.

Correspondingly, cities with poor policy showings had weak results in other output categories and thus on overall scores. Karachi, Pakistan (70th), and Mumbai, India (65th), score zero on the sustainability policy framework and also have serious GHG, air-quality and water-access challenges.

Do policies shift outcomes, or is it easier to make bold policy if you already run on hydro power instead of legacy coal? Either way, cities must nurture policy sophistication (both on decarbonization pathways and adaptation to weirder, wilder and wetter weather) to drive material improvements in sustainability.

Network initiatives like C40 Cities strive to bring Global North and Global South cities together to build capacity and solutions that work in different contexts while holding each other accountable to deliver through consistent public reporting. But most of the world lives in the hundreds of smaller cities, communities that aren’t necessarily at those prominent tables, or included in this index. Nevertheless, we need all our cities to aim higher, especially the fast-growing megacities in the bottom half of our rankings.

One might reasonably ask whether it is fair or even just to evaluate all cities to the same standard, when some are still recovering from colonial exploitation, or imposed austerity policies, and even war. Or whether it is comparable to juxtapose cities with massive informal settlements like São Paulo, Brazil (55th), with top-ranked San Francisco (21st), where almost nobody can afford to live.

One related challenge is reconciling the interplay of social and economic inequality with environmental outcomes. Which is why this year the analytics team developed the Corporate Knights Socio-Economic Adjustment Factor to adjust environmental performance indicators where they coincide with unsustainable social and economic conditions.

As our research analyst Nadia Morson notes, “Indicators such as per capita greenhouse gas emissions or per capita water consumption will be low in wealthier cities if water conservation and efficiency are priorities, but they will also be low in lower-income cities due to poverty and limited access to fuels, electricity and potable water.” Megacities of poverty may have a lower per capita carbon footprint but are problematic in a different way than wealthy cities with specific sustainability blind spots because of mass human suffering and lower inherent resiliency to rising perils. The adjustment is meant to account for that by considering a blend of income inequality, per capita GDP and human development index scores.

In a dominantly urban age, with deep social and environmental challenges facing all species, including us, how and whether our cities attain sustainability may make all the difference for our future. So while cities are inherently difficult to compare, it is worth lifting up high achievers and considering what may be required to better support those that are lagging behind.

Don Iveson advises a number of NGOs as well as cleantech, insurance and social impact businesses. He was mayor of Edmonton from 2013 to 2021.

This year we have organized the ranking by region. Click on each region below so see which cities scored A, B, C, D or F.

INDICATORS

The 2023 Sustainable Cities Index is composed of 12 quantitative indicators of environmental sustainability performance. The method is simple: for each of the indicators, the necessary data points are collected, either from public data sources or directly from the cities themselves, through our interactive data hub.

Values for each of the 12 indicators are converted to a score out of 1.0. Based on the scores of each indicator, each city will receive a letter grade and rank for their overall score on the index. Detailed scoring method is available in the full methodology document.

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As go our cities, so goes our world.

With more than half the world’s people living in cities, and urbanization only accelerating, more focus is rightly coming to the role (and performance) of cities on climate, water, air quality, biodiversity and a host of related social, health and economic outcomes.

A city can achieve sustainability goals even if its nation does not, but no nation, nor the world, will achieve its sustainability goals if our cities don’t clean up after themselves.

I believed this instinctively when I first ran for Edmonton City Council 15 years ago, but now there is so much more comparable data to work with, and more reason than ever to demand better habitats for ourselves. Almost everyone, regardless of their politics, can agree that they want clean air, stable energy prices, a healthy community and resilience in the face of crisis and change. I’ve tested this argument from many different angles, including Edmonton’s citizen assembly on climate and energy transition a decade ago, where citizens from diverse demographics and political alignments arrived at overwhelming consensus to endorse strong environmental action. In my experience, people can agree that they want their community to be better for their kids and grandkids.

As with most challenges, however, the first step is admitting we have a problem. Mayors and city councils have been sounding the alarm on climate in North America and abroad since the 1990s. The U.S. Conference of Mayors and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities have long provided training and standardized assessment tools and helped to coordinate advocacy – creating capacity to move quickly as senior governments pull regulatory levers for stronger building codes, broader electrification and carbon pricing.

Despite widespread good intentions (more than 11,000 cities have signed the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy) there are some real barriers to progress. After chairing Canada’s Big City Mayors’ Caucus for five years, and having collaborated on climate and biodiversity with mayors from around the world, I’ve learned that the story is similar most everywhere: power is fragmented, sometimes across complex layers of government. Plus, the general scarcity of revenues for cities, and widespread prohibitions on deficit spending, create sharp resource constraints and can reinforce short-termism. However, these limitations also drive creative problem-solving and novel partnerships.

Consensus for transformational change, where it is found, tends to be built from the ground up from people demanding better in their neighbourhoods. Denmark didn’t tell Copenhagen to approach sustainability as an intentional whole-of-city design exercise; it emerged as a solution to congestion and livability challenges felt on the ground. Danish culture may have made it easier, but the will coalesced around communities demanding change. Clearly, though, it helps when values are tightly aligned, as they are among Nordic cities clustered at the top of Corporate Knights’ inaugural Sustainable Cities Index, with Stockholm in first place.

Fortunately, at least in our democracies, the capacity to channel bottom-up resolve is one of the very reasons we have local governments, and one of the reasons why cities tend to be reliably progressive, even in conservative-leaning states or provinces. The will to lead, to think longer-term, to defy polarization, are hallmarks of local democracies that are more important than ever. Unlike our national and provincial politics – which are easily infected with binaries and zero-sum thinking – most city councils, at least in Canada, are non-partisan, fluid coalitions, just like the publics they proximately represent. Even in partisan city governments in the United States, citizens actually meet their elected officials at the grocery store or school drop-off and can come down to town hall and still raise the level of debate through citizen engagement. We’ve never needed these consensus-building structures more than now.

As with most challenges, however, the first step is admitting we have a problem. Mayors and city councils have been sounding the alarm on climate in North America and abroad since the 1990s.

This point was driven home to me in 2016 when I attended COP22, the UN climate summit in Marrakesh, Morocco. Following the historic 2015 Paris Agreement, the meeting was focused on implementation, including the mobilization of “non-state actors” such as cities and the business community. However, days before the conference started, that year’s U.S. presidential election outcome cast real doubt over the nascent climate consensus. The mood, particularly among American scientific and diplomatic officials, was dire. But toward the end of the conference, we found hope in the reminder of how many non-state actors were still committed, including cities from around the world.

Read the full report.

A few months later, then-president Donald Trump pronounced, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris” while triggering the U.S.’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto fired back (after pointing out that 80% of Pittsburgh had voted for Clinton), proclaiming, “As the mayor of Pittsburgh, I can assure you that we will follow the guidelines of the Paris Agreement for our people, our economy [and our] future.” The We Are Still In climate mayors group was soon more than 400 strong and represented a majority of the population and economy of the United States, driving implementation of fleet electrification, renewable energy systems, political solidarity and much-needed hope.

In this time of extraordinary political volatility, our cities matter more than ever. Which is why it is important to shine a light on what’s working, how cities compare – and where there’s room for improvement.

It’s difficult to compare fast-growing cities in the Global South with old cities in Europe or sprawling cities in North America or megacities in China, but there are some basic standards around water and air that provide key benchmarks, which explains why cities with poor air or inconsistent potable water rank lower.

Sometimes the contrasts are striking even within a country. For instance, I remember travelling to China on a trade mission and visiting coastal cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou (34 and 48), with the newest, vastest infrastructure I’d ever seen, shrouded by some of the worst air quality I’ve ever experienced, and also visiting smaller inland cities where people were burning coal in open stoves for cooking next door to brand new skyscrapers.

On this point, there are novel and relevant metrics in the Sustainable Cities Index. One I’m particularly pleased to see included is consumption-based carbon accounting, which factors in the impacts of production and supply chains, especially for cities with high rates of consumption. I would often hear complaints in Alberta about proliferating smokestacks in China during coal phase-out and carbon-pollution pricing debates – but a lot of those smokestacks are pumping out pollutants because of how much we buy from other parts of the world, and we need to account more fully for the globalized environmental implications of our own vast consumer demand.

In a time of extraordinary political volatility, our cities matter more than ever.

Consumption-based carbon accounting was something we called for in the Edmonton Declaration of 2018, emerging from the first ever Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conference on Cities and Climate, hosted in my city. High consumption rates associated with high disposable income, along with high car dependence and sprawl, are factors in Edmonton’s (21) and Calgary’s (22) lower ranking among the Canadian cohort.

Another essential measure in the Sustainable Cities Index is resiliency, since most cities aren’t adapting quickly enough to the rise in devastating floods, blistering heat waves and other climate-related catastrophes. For some cities in low-lying coastal areas, their very existence is threatened. The state of preparedness varies radically, from cities with well-documented resiliency cultures rooted in historic disasters (16th-place San Francisco’s history of earthquakes, for example). Sadly, in any greenhouse gas emissions scenario, these climate risks are going nowhere but up for several generations.

There is as much art as science in rankings and indices. Having celebrated as mayor when my city placed well, and also responded defensively when we didn’t, there are many possible interpretations. But the real art is identifying patterns and trends, like long-time leadership in Curitiba, Brazil (14), rewarding sustained leadership in northern Europe and on the west coast of North America, and motivating action from those in a position to drive needed change in some of the largest economies in the world (Houston, 39, São Paulo, 42, and Shanghai, 49).

We don’t need all our cities to look the same. In fact, innovation and competition among them is one of the things that will get us where we need to go. And some of the greatest innovations will come from cities in the Global South who can learn from, and leap past, the mistakes that established cities have made. At their essence, all cities are multipliers of human potential; that’s why we created them and why they are so extraordinary. Now, more than ever, we need them to do their magic for sustainability and human thriving.

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