Stockholm

Lowest Scope 1 emissions
The city of Stockholm is a global leader when it comes to cutting urban GHG emissions, largely thanks to its district energy heating system. As of 2019, Stockholm had cut its annual GHG emissions almost in half from 1990 levels. The city has high ambitions to be carbon neutral by 2030. By 2040, Stockholm aims to be completely fossil fuel–free.

Winnipeg

Cleanest air
Winnipeg is the top city on our index for overall air quality thanks to annual average levels of particulate air pollution that are below the World Health Organization’s air quality target. However, an increase in wildfires in Manitoba is threatening the city’s air quality, particularly during the summer months.

Amsterdam

Most sustainable transportation
Amsterdam is a sustainable transport haven: approximately 40% of all travel happens on bikes, 30% on foot. Since 2019, all trams, subway trains and many buses have been running on electricity, and more than 75% of the commercial canal boats are electric. Going the extra mile, the city is investing in shared electric car and scooter services.

Copenhagen

Lowest water consumption
In recent decades, Copenhagen has made every drop of water count. Since the late 1980s, the city has successfully cut back on water use by increasing the fees residents pay for water and installing low-flow toilets and showerheads. In 1987, Copenhageners used an average of more than 170 litres per day. Today that figure is just below 100 litres, with plans to get to 90 by 2025.

Abidjan

Lowest consumption-based emissions
The Ivory Coast aims to be net-zero by 2030. Its capital city, Abidjan, is well on its way with the lowest consumption-based emissions of cities analyzed. However, this is likely due to a high level of poverty rather than a shift in policy or lifestyle – a reminder that many of the world’s developing countries have contributed least to the climate crisis.

Oslo

Most resilient to climate change
Located in a fjord, Oslo is fairly well protected from bad weather, but that may change in decades to come, and the city wants to be ready. In 2015, municipal leaders set out to make their city resilient to the climate crisis. Key to that is improving its stormwater management and making sure that climate adaptation is embedded in its urban planning, among other strategies.

READ MORE: The hunt for the world’s most sustainable cities

The post 6 sustainable cities that stand out appeared first on Corporate Knights.

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.

The post The hunt for the world’s most sustainable cities appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Inside their postcard of a home, the family enjoyed a lifestyle not so different from ours in North Toronto. Except for one thing: nothing in that house was wasted. Once a month, a garbage truck trundled down the ribbon of road running through the valley and the four-member family contributed their monthly yield: one small shopping bag of trash.

An environmentalist at heart, my mother came home bursting with inspiration. Henceforth, we were going to shoehorn our North Toronto lifestyle into Black Forest standards of sustainability. But try as we might – recycling scraps of cellophane, crushing cardboard boxes, patching pants – it couldn’t be done. Not even close. Our weekly garbage bins – like those of our neighbours – remained full to overflowing, and when Toronto introduced recycling bins in 1988, they were too.

Cities are incredibly wasteful places. They generate mountains of garbage: discarded items of all kinds, many still containing most of their value. And then there’s the waste that results from poor policy and planning: roads clogged with single-driver SUVs, suburbanites commuting hours to work, the unhoused having to pitch tents in parks for lack of affordable housing. Wastes of time and space, of human potential and planetary health.

Among economists, there’s a growing consensus that the inherently wasteful linear model that has defined industrial production and economic growth for the last two centuries – of take, make, use and lose – is no longer tenable. In its stead, a circular model is being proposed, one that “uses less materials, for longer, again and again,” in the words of Joanne Gauci, a senior policy advisor to Metro Vancouver. In 2013, Metro Vancouver launched the National Zero Waste Council, which aims to promote circularity in Canadian cities by bringing municipal leaders together with representatives of government, business, academia and the non-profit sector.

It’s a global trend; Swiss-based sustainable building materials firm Holcim, which has developed a “Circular Cities Barometer,” counts Delhi, Lagos, Bogotá, Wuhan and Manila among the most circular cities in the world. Isolating the metrics on the Corporate Knights Sustainable Cities Index that reflect circularity – consumption-based emissions, water usage and waste generated – the cities that rise to the top include the likely Nordic candidates, but also Auckland (New Zealand), Arequipa (Peru) and Taichung (Taiwan). And while waste reduction is a higher priority in high-income countries – which account for 16% of the world’s population but 34% of its waste – the balance is set to shift.

The World Bank expects that as their populations and economies grow, low-income countries will assert waste dominance, tripling their current levels of production by 2050. By then, South and East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa will likely be the world’s most prodigious waste-producers in absolute terms: a serious problem, as most disposal in these regions takes the form of open dumping.

Atinuke Chineme is tackling the challenge already. Having grown up in Nigeria, she is now working on a biowaste treatment project on the outskirts of the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam, while pursuing a doctorate in environmental design at the University of Calgary. For this pilot project, members of a women’s collective gather organic waste from local markets and deposit it in purpose-built bins to be broken down by the famously voracious black soldier fly. The process is an odourless, contained alternative to open dumping that yields commercial by-products: the fly’s protein-rich larvae, which is used as animal feedstock, and rich soil for fertilizer.

“In the West, the focus is on the technological aspects of the circular economy. In the Global South, it’s more on the biological cycle,” says Chineme, who considers the circular economy an “internationally accepted term” for what she would otherwise call traditional practice. “It’s good for us to realize the value in what we already have. We’ve always known that waste can be used,” she says.

This perspective has long since been lost in high-income countries. Contrary to our righteous self-image as stewards of a vast natural landscape, Canadians are among the world’s most wasteful citizens, consuming more materials, water and energy per capita than almost any other country, according to a 2021 report by the Council of Canadian Academies. Canada tops the charts for waste per capita, followed by Bulgaria and the United States, and almost three-quarters (73%) of waste in Canada is incinerated or ends up in landfill, which in turn accounts for 24% of the country’s methane emissions.

It’s good for us to realize the value in what we already have. We’ve always known that waste can be used.

 

–Atinuke Chineme,University of Calgary

Stockholm, which ranks first on Corporate Knights’ index again in 2023, benefits from Sweden’s long embrace of circularity: from the country’s deposit system on bottles and cans, which dates from the 1980s, to the 2017 tax reform that favours second-hand purchases and repairs, to the 2018 creation of a national advisory group that integrates circularity into government policy. But the European city that has embraced circularity most ambitiously is Amsterdam, which, in 2020, resolved to halve its use of natural resources by 2030 and achieve complete circularity and climate neutrality by 2050. It is the first city to attempt to implement British economist Kate Raworth’s “doughnut” economic model: an aspirational schematic that constrains economic activity to the sweet spot between an ecological ceiling of natural limits (represented by the doughnut’s outer ring) and a social foundation of basic human needs and rights (the inner ring).

For some, models of doughnuts and circles are just old wine in new bottles, fancy riffs on the folk wisdom of doing more with less. But at the very least, the push toward a non-linear economic model is impelling cities to take stock. The City of Toronto, for instance, established a dedicated circular economy team within its Solid Waste Management Services division in 2018, one of the first municipalities in North America to do so. Three years later, it generated a baseline report that shows how materials flow through the city in three key sectors: waste management, food and construction.

Colourful diagrams illustrate where the city’s annual 2.1 million tonnes of waste come from, and where they end up. It’s instructive; the bulk (60%) of the city’s waste is generated by non-residential sources: institutions, businesses and industry, construction and demolition. Most of that waste is handled by private contractors looking for the cheapest disposal option, which is generally landfill. So, try as the city may to increase the portion of residential waste that it diverts from landfill and into recycling programs (currently 53%), the lion’s share of its waste problem will remain unresolved until it gets other levels of government and the private sector on board: “radical collaboration” is what Gauci says the circular economy demands.

Beyond the bold policies, lofty aspirations and savvy entrepreneurs, there has to be a fundamental shift in mentality

 

It also requires bold policy. San Francisco has paved the way in waste reduction with a steady stream of initiatives, beginning with a 2003 Zero Waste resolution to stop landfill dumping by 2020. In 2009, it passed a mandatory recycling and composting ordinance for all residences and businesses, the first of its kind in the U.S. It also set fees for garbage collection higher than those for recycling and composting and calibrated residential bin size to its priorities: recycling at 64 gallons, composting at 32, garbage at 16. Unlike most North American cities, which contract out waste management to multiple companies, San Francisco has an exclusive relationship with one, making it easier to align priorities. While San Francisco didn’t meet its 2020 target, it’s getting there, currently diverting more than 80% of its waste from landfill; New York City’s diversion rate, by comparison, is 17%.

Despite these kinds of gains, sustainability experts agree that of the three Rs, the emphasis must now be on the first two: reduce and reuse. The notion that recycling would be a waste panacea – allowing us to have our consumption cake and eat it too – has gone up in smoke. Metro Vancouver, with one of the most successful recycling programs in Canada, is diverting only 65% of the 450 kilograms that its citizens throw out annually, into recycling programs. And even when those programs work like well-oiled machines, as Recycle BC does, only a fraction of the recycled material (46%, in the case of recycled plastics) is being recovered in a usable form. The rest ends up in landfill: 976,230 tonnes of solid waste in 2021.

To some, “reduce” implies loss, economic contraction, fewer shiny new things. A 2021 report published by the National Zero Waste Council suggests otherwise, estimating that 20,000 jobs and $41 billion in revenue could be generated through 15 “interventions” such as mandating the minimum recycled content in plastic, insisting that buildings be designed for disassembly, and facilitating the repair and reuse of appliances and furniture. On top of that is the climate case: the 4.9 million tonnes of CO2 emissions and 4.9 million tonnes of waste that such measures would spare.

Gauci points to a growing number of Vancouver businesses that are thriving from the regenerative economy – like ChopValue, which converts used chopsticks into furniture and now has locations across seven countries, and Unbuilders, which dismantles and salvages the reusable elements of homes slated for demolition.

But beyond the bold policies, lofty aspirations and savvy entrepreneurs, there has to be a fundamental shift in mentality: from the Costco logic of buying more because it’s cheap, to buying less because what we have is dear. We can’t shop our way out of this problem. A wholesale switch to electric vehicles does nothing to address the problem of congestion, whereas more HOV lanes, ride-sharing apps and better public transit does. This is where cities can take the lead: modelling fairness and efficiency, encouraging less wasteful behaviour, making the most of what they have.

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.

The post These circular cities want to send landfills to the trash bin of history appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Between now and 2030, building out the global sustainability transition will require investments in the order of US$6 to $9 trillion per year. The infrastructure for the post-fossil-fuel economy will be built mostly in cities and will lean heavily into information technologies, digitization and electrification. When it has run its course, that transformation will have affected every aspect of urban living, including buildings, transportation, water supply, waste reduction and energy.

The leaders in the Corporate Knights Sustainable Cities Index are the vanguard of the urban transition that is now fully underway. The examples below provide estimates of the investment opportunity in three critical segments: green buildings, zero-emission transportation infrastructure and smart microgrids.

Green buildings

$1.5-trillion global investment/year
City government role: Regulations and permitting, green development standards.
Example: The Stack is Vancouver’s first commercial zero-carbon office tower. Developed by Oxford Properties and completed in fall 2022, the 540,000-square-foot building is certified zero carbon by the Canada Green Building Council. At 37 storeys, it’s the city’s tallest building.

Zero-emission transportation

$2-trillion global investment/year
City government role: Direct investment, planning approval and coordination.
Example: Engineering firm WSP and the City of Stockholm are expanding the Tramway City network, connecting the suburbs to the city centre. The BREEAM Infrastructure–certified project will cover almost 16 kilometres and is expected to carry 63,000 passengers daily by 2030.

Smart microgrids

$1-trillion global investment/year
City government role: Bylaws, regulations, permits affecting local distribution of electricity, siting of facilities.
Example: Each newly built home in the subdevelopment of Durango at Shadow Mountain, outside of L.A., is connected to a microgrid and outfitted with a 13 KWh battery, EV charger, rooftop solar array and smart thermostat. The Schneider Electric Square D Energy Center manages the home’s energy circuit to enhance resilience from the larger grid.

The post Investment opportunities await in greening the world’s cities appeared first on Corporate Knights.