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.

The mayors of the top three cities in this year’s Sustainable Cities Index – Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen – are all women, but the trend is not unique to famously progressive Scandinavia; from Bogotá to Mexico City to Accra to Tokyo, female mayors around the world are distinguishing themselves as climate leaders. Indeed, 50% of the top 10 cities in the index are led by women. C40, the network of cities founded in 2005 by then London mayor Ken Livingstone to collectively promote climate action, has spawned a subgroup of female mayors. In 2014, they numbered four; three years later, they were 15, and their number continues to grow.

There’s no single explanation for this swell in female municipal leadership, and it’s risky to attribute certain qualities or strengths to women as a whole. Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek points out that while men are typically judged on their ability to deliver business results, women are expected to be caring and nurturing advocates for the weak and vulnerable, and for Mother Earth. To rise through the ranks in municipal politics, women have to prove their mettle in all areas, or, as Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has put it, “work 10 times harder than men.”

If any generalization can be made, then, it would be that by the time women land in the mayoral seat, they’ve learned how to fight. “You have to be unafraid,” says Gondek, whose first act upon being elected mayor of Canada’s oil and gas capital last November was to declare a climate emergency. Gondek felt the public statement was vital to Calgary’s future prosperity, framing it not in opposition to the oil and gas industry, but in keeping with a “transition and transformation” that has long since been underway but not yet become part of her city’s narrative.

It was a bold move for Calgary’s first female mayor, but this is something “first female mayors” are known for. When she was first elected in 2014, Hidalgo immediately and unabashedly tried to rid Paris’s centre of most cars, which she blamed for many of the city’s ills: air pollution, loud traffic and greenhouse gas emissions. In a highly symbolic move, she had the highway that ran along the left bank of the Seine converted into 4.5 hectares of pedestrian-only greenspace. She also announced a ban on all diesel cars by 2024 and petrol cars by 2030, while vowing to make Paris a cyclist’s dream by creating an additional 1,000 kilometres of permanent bike lanes and removing 72% of existing parking spots.

The moves provoked fierce opposition – and an unsuccessful legal challenge – from conservative and motorist groups. In a 2019 interview, Hidalgo attributed the “violence” of the reaction in part to her gender. “Being a woman that wants to reduce the number of cars meant that I upset lots of men,” she said, adding that two-thirds of public transport users are women.

To rise through the ranks in municipal politics, women have to prove their mettle in all areas, or, as Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has put it, “work 10 times harder than men.”

But the benefits of Hidalgo’s vision quickly became clear. Re-elected in 2020 for a second term, Hidalgo expanded the scope of her plans, packaging the ideas of Franco-Colombian systems theorist Carlos Moreno into the proposition of the “ville du quart d’heure,” or 15-minute city. Very much in the tradition of famed urbanist Jane Jacobs, the objective of this hyper-localism is to make it possible for city dwellers, wherever they live, to access the essentials of life – work, school, recreation, food, medical services – within a 15-minute walk or bike ride of their homes. The concept has quickly gained currency in cities around the world.

Following Hidalgo’s lead, Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante made the 15-minute city a central plank of her campaign for re-election last November, presenting the proximity to libraries and recreational and cultural facilities as an antidote to youth disengagement and rising gun violence. C40 has built its blueprint for post-pandemic urban recovery around the 15-minute city.

It’s a recurring theme with bold ideas; once implemented and experienced, they don’t seem so bold after all. Women mayors seem to understand this. In 2002, Annika Billström, the first female mayor of Stockholm, committed what was expected to be political suicide by proposing a congestion charge on all vehicles entering the inner city. Built on an archipelago and accessed largely by bridges, Stockholm was facing serious traffic problems, with two-thirds of workers in the downtown core commuting from the suburbs. Billström’s congestion-charge proposal was met with outrage, so she suggested that it be put to a referendum, but not before the city had tried it out. Over the course of a seven-month trial in which cars were charged roughly US$3 every time they crossed an electronic cordon into the downtown core, traffic volumes dropped by a fifth, travel times were significantly reduced, and a quarter of work commuters switched to public transit.

When the trial period ended, Stockholm reverted to its old ways, but Stockholmers viewed them differently. They realized the merits of fast roads over free roads. In the 2006 referendum, a majority voted in favour of the charge, and public support for it has only grown since then.

Three of the four mayors to succeed Billström in Stockholm have been women, and the city, which was named the European Commission’s first European Green Capital in 2010, continues to excel in its environmental and climate performance. Under Karin Wanngård, who served as mayor from 2014 to 2018, the city set itself a target of being not only carbon neutral but fossil-fuel free by 2040, five years earlier than the Swedish national goal. It also established higher standards for energy-efficient buildings than in the rest of the country.

Like many mayors, Wanngård understood the importance of the role model. Using her bike to get around in all seasons and proudly displaying her preference for second-hand clothes, she presented sustainability as an opportunity rather than an exercise in enforced belt-cinching. This can-do attitude is critical, as is the determination to use cities to demonstrate to other levels of government what is possible.

The Swedish capital has a tradition of collaborating formally with the private sector to achieve its goals. Established in 2007, the Stockholm Climate Pact is a network of businesses and organizations that work with the city’s leadership to develop and implement climate strategies. Anna König Jerlmyr, Stockholm’s mayor since 2018, is harnessing this cooperation in the “electrification pact” – an all-out effort to boost electric vehicle infrastructure and electrical capacity. By 2030, Stockholm aims for all parking spots in the inner city to be equipped with chargers and for all traffic there to be emission-free.

König Jerlmyr believes the city’s 2040 goal is well within reach.

Women mayors find inspiration in each other. Asked about exciting ongoing urban initiatives, König Jerlmyr points across the globe to Freetown, in Sierra Leone, where Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr has launched a project to plant one million trees on the denuded hills surrounding the capital city to mitigate flooding and landslides , while creating rural jobs to stem urban migration.

The project reflects the kind of lateral thinking that is required to address climate change, in both the Global South, where women mayors in Accra (Mayor Elizabeth K. T. Sackey), Mexico City (Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo) and Bogotá (Mayor Claudia López Hernández) are leading bold sustainability initiatives, and cities in the north. “I’ve always been after the triple bottom line,” says Calgary’s Gondek, referring to the triad of social, economic and environmental factors that inform good policy. “You have to blend priorities.”

Beate Weber-Schuerholz, the first female mayor of the southern German city of Heidelberg, who served in the position for 16 years beginning in 1990, believes this is something women do particularly well. “Women rarely have the chance to ascend the ladder directly,” she says, referring to the balancing act of family and career. “The steps they go up are very broad.”

She believes this shared experience makes women more inclined to compare notes – to learn from, rather than compete with, each other – and equips them well to confront the cross-cutting challenge of climate change, at once highly technical and deeply human.

Meet five women mayors blazing a greener trail

Anna König Jerlmyr
Stockholm, Sweden

Anna König Jerlmyr wants Stockholm to become the world’s first climate-positive city by 2040 and fossil-fuel free by 2030. To do so, she is looking to completely electrify the city’s transit system and take advantage of emerging carbon capture and storage technology.

Jyoti Gondek
Calgary, Alberta

One of Jyoti Gondek’s first orders of business after she was elected in 2021 was to pass a motion in city council declaring a climate emergency. In her campaign to become Calgary’s first female mayor, Gondek made climate change and resilience a key priority for the oil and gas capital of Canada.

Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo

Mexico City, Mexico

As a former environmental engineer, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo (Mexico City’s first female mayor, elected in 2018) focuses her efforts on reducing vehicle emissions and expanding the city’s public transit. Her ambitious plans also include tackling the water crisis.

Valérie Plante

Montreal, Quebec

First elected in 2017 (and re-elected in 2021), Valérie Plante has led Montreal’s campaign to slash emissions by 55% below 1990 levels by 2030. She also plans to implement a zero-emission zone in downtown Montreal by 2030, plant 500,000 trees and electrify public transport.

Anne Hidalgo
Paris, France

Anne Hidalgo has led a transformation of the streets and public squares of Paris to make them more friendly to walking and cycling since she was elected in 2014. Her administration has shut off car access on one side of the river Seine and spent €150 million building 300 kilometres of bike lanes.

The post Women lead the world’s most sustainable cities appeared first on Corporate Knights.

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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This wasn’t the first time that energy efficiency experts had challenged the EPC rating system. Earlier in 2021, the national government had concluded that an EPC grade didn’t predict how larger buildings actually performed in terms of energy consumption and carbon emissions.

The United Kingdom’s EPC labelling system is hardly unique. Since the early 1990s, hundreds of thousands of developers have opted to build their projects according to elaborate checklists and performance thresholds prescribed by green building organizations. Some, however, have not aged well. Just 12 years ago, a New York developer erected a US$1.8-billion office building, One Bryant Park, praised for its sustainability features and its LEED Platinum rating. Today, the owner faces steep fines because the building’s carbon emissions exceed the cap established by a 2019 New York City bylaw known as Local Law 97.

These clashes reveal two important shifts in the narrative about the carbon footprint of buildings: one is that some green labels don’t really deliver the goods; the second is that local building and energy codes, which traditionally established minimal standards, are playing a much more important role in driving carbon reduction in buildings, which account for about 40% of all greenhouse gases.

Since the early 1990s, the world of voluntary certification has functioned like a marketplace of aspiration. A range of organizations offer seals of approval for a fee. Developers have to jump through hoops that run the gamut from technical air tightness measures and storm water management to fuzzier categories, such as wellness and “ecosystem services.”

The oldest is BREEAM, which originated in the United Kingdom. It commands the largest market share in Europe (560,000 buildings are BREEAM certified) and is seen as the common ancestor for many later certification schemes, including LEED, which has been administered since 1993 by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). As of 2019, the USGBC had issued 100,000 LEED building certifications for commercial projects. Passive House, prevalent in northern Europe, has a narrower mandate focusing on energy performance.

The number of building certification standards has proliferated. A 2017 study published in Building and Environment estimated there are now about 600 green rating systems globally. Developers seek out such certifications not just because they yield greener buildings, but also because those buildings are more marketable, and profitable. In North America, academics and environmentalists have criticized LEED’s approach because developers could game it out, running up their score by adding cosmetic features (e.g., bike parking) that don’t really improve a building’s carbon footprint.

A 2018 study published in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology offered a bracing conclusion: “A decade of research suggests that LEED-certified buildings, on average, achieve little or no primary energy savings relative to other similar buildings,” the authors  wrote. “Evidence suggests that any reduction in site energy is typically achieved through increased electric use and corresponding off-site energy loss.”

But in the past few years, some governments have stepped into this breach by cranking up their sleepy old building codes as a means of driving decarbonization.

“A decade of research suggests that LEED-certified buildings, on average, achieve little or no primary energy savings relative to other similar buildings.”

–Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology

The City of Toronto and the province of British Columbia, for example, have both adopted what are known as “step codes” – tiered building regulations that set out increasingly stringent energy/carbon performance standards. For private builders, the first-tier requirements are mandatory, and the system works like an escalator: at regular intervals, the second (voluntary) tier becomes the basic mandatory tier, and so on. The fourth and latest version of the Toronto Green Standard went into effect in May.

Under New York’s Local Law 97, property owners whose buildings have more than 25,000 square feet of floor space are required to meet energy efficiency targets and reduce emissions by 20% by 2024 or face fines; even more stringent caps come into effect by 2030.

San Francisco in 2020 banned the use of natural gas in all new buildings, joining New York City and a growing number of municipalities that have taken the same step. California this year amended its own building energy code to require all new homes to be fitted out with solar panels, phase out refrigerants, and establish new standards for heat pumps and electricity storage systems to ease pressure on the grid.

For years, environmentalists have argued that tougher building codes could reduce emissions, and this future seems to have finally arrived, at least in some places. But it raises an interesting question about all those certifications: in a world of tougher codes, will these ecolabels still be necessary?

Thomas Moore, a senior consultant with Steven Winter Associates, a New York–based green building services firm, says the choice of certification is highly dependent on the type of project. For companies or institutions that plan to own a structure for a long time, he says, the best choice is Passive House, which emphasizes airtight building envelopes, high-performance windows and extensive insulation, all of which is meant to minimize heat loss and thus reduce energy consumption by as much as 90%.

“People in New York City with projects that achieved high LEED ratings are now being told that there’s a new law on carbon emissions that wasn’t accounted for 10 or 20 years ago and [they] will get a fine.”

–Yetsuh Frank, managing director of Building Energy Exchange

Passive House certification, moreover, has to be earned through verification of the completed project’s actual energy performance, not via checklists of features that generate points, as is the case with LEED (i.e., a LEED Platinum building must score over 80, whereas LEED Certified is 40 to 49). “If you’re a long-term investor and will hold on to a building for 50 years,” Moore says, “then Passive House aligns very well.” Some point to the fact that one way to achieve Passive House certification is to use a lot of petrochemical-based insulation, which drives up embodied carbon. But life-cycle analysis will be mandatory by the end of the decade.

Toronto now accepts Passive House–grade energy modelling results as a means of demonstrating compliance with the Toronto Green Standard. By 2030, they’ll no longer be optional. New York, by contrast, took a more hard-edged approach with Local Law 97, which has firm 2025 deadlines and real fines. By 2024, New York will also have an all-electric building regulation.

These new building codes represent a sea-change, says architect Yetsuh Frank, managing director of Building Energy Exchange, a non-profit that seeks to educate building owners on decarbonization. “People in New York City with projects that achieved high LEED ratings are now being told that there’s a new law on carbon emissions that wasn’t accounted for 10 or 20 years ago and [they] will get a fine.” He points out that by emphasizing the stick as much as the carrot, New York legislators have forced property managers and their bankers to pay more attention to the risk exposure associated with failing to update older buildings.

Moore is also seeing more projects where the developer is layering on certifications; that is, using not just LEED or Passive House, but others that measure related aspects of a building’s performance, like healthy indoor environments. “That’s what buyers care about,” he says, pointing out that certification systems like Well and Passive House are highly complementary.

All of this activity offers more proof that we simply have to find ways to make buildings that generate fewer emissions and don’t make their inhabitants sick; neither are nice-to-haves. Indeed, it may be that the voluntary building-certification systems that evolved over the past three decades will eventually become obsolete. The sooner we get to that day, the better.

Toronto journalist John Lorinc writes about cities, sustainability and business.

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“I believe that a movement of academics, students and city governments can make some pretty profound and needed change,” says David Miller, former chairman of C40, a global network of mayors tackling the climate crisis. “It’s a very exciting moment.” The former Toronto mayor now leads C40’s Centre for Urban Climate Policy and Economy.

The imperative to act is not lost on the world’s urban leaders. Cities worldwide consume 78% of the world’s energy and produce more than 60% of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations, but are also potential change-makers in the global campaign for a sustainable future.

Positioned to assist cities in their emerging role are campus-based urban researchers and students.

About 45 universities worldwide have these specialized centres, estimates Karen Chapple, appointed last year as the inaugural director of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto. “There is something about the urban institute as a living laboratory which is quite unique, so in that way we have a shared ethos across all 45 [centres],” she says.

Three institutes – the LSE Cities centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, and U of T’s School of Cities – illustrate the trend for academics to work with cities to solve complex issues like climate, migration and social inequity.

“Cities today are on the front line of profound man-made disasters,” says LSE Cities director Ricky Burdett. “Mayors have to respond in a very quick way … their exposure to dramatic change has never been as tangible as it is now.”

LSE Cities, one of the oldest institutes, began its activities in 1999 and became a research centre in 2010, combining interdisciplinary research, teaching and outreach. For example, its Master of Science in City Design and Social Science enrols students from various academic disciplines who work on specific projects in London from the perspective of sustainability, architecture and design.

Cities today are on the front line of profound man-made disasters. Mayors have to respond in a very quick way … their exposure to dramatic change has never been as tangible as it is now.

–LSE Cities director Ricky Burdett

In 2016, LSE Cities added an Executive Master of Science in Cities, with in-person and virtual learning over 18 months, for mid-career urban professionals (including C40 mayors) who are committed to leading large-scale efforts to address climate action through an evidence-based approach. Economic inequality and the climate crisis are top concerns, says program co-director Savvas Verdis. “Cities are very good at crystalizing these challenges that are global in nature into very local problems,” he says. “Mayors are, unfortunately, being asked to do a lot of the fire-fighting.”

Among its diverse activities, LSE Cities offers an academic course for city leaders to craft child-friendly policies. In addition, Burdett and other faculty members directly advise cities, including a recent consultation with Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa on its rapid urbanization challenges.

Collaboration defines many of the global programs. In 2021, Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, announced a US$150-million commitment to expand the Bloomberg Harvard [University] City Leadership Initiative, a training program for mayors established in 2016. The donation also supports a university-wide cities centre for leadership and governance and endowed faculty appointments The Bloomberg Harvard program provides an all-expenses-paid executive education experience for 40 mayors annually from around the world.

“All global problems have a local impact, and we cannot afford to wait for national or international bodies to come up with the solutions,” says Jorrit de Jong, director of the Bloomberg Center for Cities and faculty co-chair of the Bloomberg Harvard program. “The problems are so urgent that you are held accountable by local residents; there are levers that local leaders can use that they are not always aware of.”

Mike Savage, mayor of Halifax Regional Municipality, was one of three Canadian mayors in the 2018 class. “A lot of that stuff that we learned informed the way we have governed since we have gotten back to our cities,” he says. One lesson he learned was how to develop a public narrative as a tool to engage stakeholders on city priorities, such as Halifax’s pledge to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

I hope current leaders will feel better equipped to tackle problems that seem insurmountable.

–Jorrit de Jong, director of the Bloomberg Center for Cities

In the year-long experience, with several days of in-class learning followed by virtual seminars, mayors must identify a local problem to solve. For Savage, it was how to bring big infrastructure projects to fruition with public support. He and two senior city officials had access to Harvard faculty, who advised on policy implementation, and the assistance of a Bloomberg Harvard–sponsored graduate student on a three-month summer fellowship with the city.

With such support, says de Jong, “I hope current leaders will feel better equipped to tackle problems that seem insurmountable.”

The Bloomberg Harvard program also looks to recruit future civic leaders, with a new two-year, paid fellowship for recent graduates to work with mayors on their priorities. “We hope to create a talent pipeline of students who had not thought about going into city government,” says de Jong.

Like its counterparts, U of T’s School of Cities emphasizes knowledge dissemination and urban problem-solving. But it differs from others in having no dedicated faculty. Instead, the School of Cities funds researchers from multiple disciplines. For its first grant, it mobilized 45 academics from 20 departments to explore climate justice issues. “We were designed to crosscut many different departments,” says Chapple. Linking academia and the community is key. She says researchers are expected to “make sure your research project is useful to people on the ground working on climate and justice issues,” with community stakeholders involved in the design of research.

No less important is nurturing new talent. Clarence Qian, with graduate degrees in architecture (Waterloo) and business (Toronto), spent his year as a 2021 Urban Leadership Fellow examining the potential of mass timber construction to contribute to sustainable, affordable residential housing. This year, while completing his business studies, he signed up for the School of Cities’ graduate multidisciplinary urban project, which brings together students from various academic disciplines to work on an urban problem.

Qian and his team members examined how to add laneway homes, duplexes and triplexes to the traditional mix of residential housing options.
“In my MBA, we talk about numbers every day,” he says. “For urban issues, it is never just one aspect; for my [multidisciplinary] project, I met others from different perspectives.”

Qian, now director of development at Distrikt real estate developers, sees his future in cities. “My passion is trying to make the city of Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area a better place for people to live.”

That’s promising for urban advocates like C40’s Miller.

“It is my hope that universities that are making such an effort to link directly with city governments can spark that [youth] interest into a real fire of passion for solutions to our society’s challenges,” he says.

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In Canada, for example, 82 per cent of the population now lives in cities. The percentage of urban dwellers is slightly higher in the United States at 84 per cent, while Mexico sits at 78 per cent. According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, which tracks global urbanization trends, Canada and the U.S. now rank among the Top 50 urbanized countries – ahead of Germany, England, Italy and other Western European states.

Some cities may be experiencing booming growth, but public investment in urban infrastructure such as sewage and solid waste management, energy production and distribution, transit, and other built structures has lagged. As noted in a recent Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives study, this growing urban infrastructure deficit is impossible to ignore:

“The evidence is clear, both in the statistics, and in the everyday experience of Canadians in every part of the country: in spine-jarring streets and highways; in mind-numbing and catastrophically wasteful traffic jams … in the struggles of rapidly growing communities to keep up with the need for the basic nuts and bolts of urban civilization.”

The study and other research show governments have responded to the infrastructure deficit during times of crisis, spending billions with economic stimulus programs to keep the construction industry going during economic downturns or when alarming episodes of crumbling expressways and sewage floods make headlines.

At the same time, a less obvious but incredibly valuable asset of cities – green infrastructure like urban forests, local parks, healthy waterways and beaches – has received comparatively little political attention or government funding, despite its enormous value to urban dwellers.

Natural ecosystems and vegetative technologies like green roofs and engineered wetlands extend the life of many types of traditional infrastructure by assisting, for example, with storm water management. They also provide a range of additional co-benefits that improve the health and well-being of urban communities. This includes reduced smog, enhanced habitat for biodiversity like songbirds and insect pollinators, increased workplace productivity, and even psychological and restorative benefits for urban dwellers, such as stress relief.

Yet, while leafy neighbourhoods still exist in older parts of major cities, such as Toronto and Chicago, most remain largely deforested. Experts have determined that a minimum 30 per cent forest cover is required to maintain a healthy local ecosystem, yet only 18 per cent of Toronto and an abysmal 5 per cent of some of its bedroom communities are covered in trees. Indeed, despite their critical value as natural assets, forests and other elements of green infrastructure continue to be dug up, drained and paved over to make way for more roads, strip malls and subdivisions.

The consequences of this decline and degradation are far reaching. They include higher built infrastructure costs associated with managing storm water and greater vulnerability to natural disturbances such as floods and storms, as Hurricane Sandy demonstrated. Furthermore, new research also shows that people living in neighbourhoods lacking in mature trees and other green infrastructure face increased depression and other health risks.

A recent U.S. Forest Service study found that widespread infestation of urban forests and tree-lined streets by the emerald ash borer, an invasive insect, has not only killed tens of millions of urban trees, but is contributing to higher rates of death from cardiovascular and lower respiratory tract illness among urban dwellers. These are the first and third most common causes of death in the U.S.

The direct causal relationship between trees and human health is not fully understood, but scientists believe people living in urban areas are less active, suffer from greater stress levels and are exposed to poorer air quality in neighbourhoods lacking green infrastructure. Conversely, trees are so efficient at removing airborne pollutants like carbon monoxide, lead and nitrogen dioxide that Columbia University researchers estimate for every 343 trees added to a square kilometre, asthma rates in young people drop by about 25 per cent.

And let’s not forget greenhouse gases. Another recent study by the U.S. Forest Service found that America’s urban forests store an estimated 708 million tons of carbon, an environmental service with an estimated value of $50 billion. Annually, net carbon uptake is estimated at 21 million tons, representing $1.5 billion in annual economic benefits.

While higher levels of government have yet to catch on to the enormous value of sustaining and growing the stock of green infrastructure in our cities, leadership is happening at local levels. For example, the David Suzuki Foundation and more than a dozen local community groups have launched a cheeky new campaign to create Canada’s first “Homegrown National Park” in downtown Toronto. This new crowdsourced green urban corridor will be located along one of the city’s most notable “lost rivers,” which now lies buried beneath asphalt and concrete. The project aims to enhance, restore and create urban green space and other green infrastructure through planting native trees and shrubs, cultivating bird- and bug-friendly gardens, and growing food in backyards and on balconies.

Continuing to ignore the green infrastructure needs of our cities, such as local parks and naturalized school grounds, is shortsighted. Green spaces complement traditional infrastructure, provide a multitude of ecological benefits and contribute to the health and well-being of urban populations.

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