The initiatives were part of a boom that has been impossible to ignore: until the international housing market collapse in the past two years, Toronto had more building activity than any other North American city.

Despite that record of achievement, Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government, led by Premier Doug Ford, has spent the past few years rolling back these policies. In early May, the province finally passed an omnibus piece of legislation called the Building Homes and Improving Transportation Infrastructure Act, 2026, or Bill 98.

The provisions removed requirements that builders provide charging for electric vehicles and eliminated all references to mandatory “sustainable design” from the province’s planning law — a move that effectively killed the Toronto Green Standard. Bill 98 built on the Ford government’s decision last year to repeal legislation that mandated green roofs on new buildings. According to the city, the bylaw between 2010 and 2025 had spawned a $50-million industry and created 1,200 buildings with green roofs across Toronto.

City officials say the Toronto Green Standard has removed almost one million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions over the past 16 years and has saved homeowners and building operators an estimated $407.6 million in utility costs. “The city is not supportive of the proposed changes as they would limit Toronto’s ability to advance local climate objectives and to continue the significant progress made in achieving sustainable development that has been made possible through the Toronto Green Standard (TGS),” chief planner Jason Thorne says in a statement to Corporate Knights, adding that the city will cooperate with the province on implementing the new law.

Bill 98 eliminates future cost savings from building out the city’s green roofs, says How-Sen Chong, a climate campaigner for the Toronto Environmental Alliance. “Just the energy efficiency piece [of the TGS] has saved Torontonians millions and millions of dollars since its introduction 20 years ago.”

How it worked

Modelled on British Columbia’s innovative “energy step code,” Toronto’s green standard took a carrot-and-stick approach to incentivizing builders to improve the carbon performance and resilience of their projects. The standard laid out four “tiers,” each with increasingly stringent targets. Every proposed building above a certain size had to satisfy the lowest tier, and developers became eligible for certain incentives if they set out to meet the higher-tier standards. Public-sector projects had to conform to the highest tier. The Toronto Green Standard didn’t mandate the materials or systems used in new buildings but rather set out performance targets that projects had to meet. (This approach is similar to fuel efficiency benchmarks for vehicles: the rules don’t tell the manufacturer how to get there but instead specify the goal.)

At regular intervals, the city increases the targets, such that the new lowest mandatory tier is equivalent to the previous second tier, and so on — an approach that guarantees a steadily increasing baseline for building energy performance. One of its key attributes is the predictability it provided developers who have to manage long time horizons. It also encouraged green building designers and suppliers to invest in the Toronto market, knowing that developers and architects would need to source increasingly energy-efficient components.

The goal at the core of the Toronto Green Standard (and B.C.’s step code) was to forge a path between the minimum energy and emissions standards in many North American building codes and the far more ambitious versions found in the United Kingdom and northern Europe.

Government attacks

Bill 98, in a way, is about dealing with unfinished political business. The Ford government initially came for the green standard in 2022, with an earlier piece of legislation. But City of Toronto lawyers concluded that as part of the city’s climate plan, the Toronto Green Standard regulations could stand.

This latest effort has plenty of detractors. Peter Tabuns, the NDP’s environment and conservation critic, points out that the Ford government’s developer-friendly policies run counter to worrisome climate-related weather patterns, such as extreme heat, urban wildfires and flooding, as well as rising fossil fuel costs. As for the new EV charger policy, Tabuns says, “If you want to have an automotive industry, you need to go electric. Destroying the [charging] infrastructure is undermining the industry.”

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Bill 98 “arbitrarily scapegoats parking for zero-emissions vehicles selectively,” adds Phil Pothen, counsel at Environmental Defence, who says the provision runs counter to planning laws that have eliminated the mandatory minimum underground parking requirements for new projects, rules that go some distance in reducing all the carbon associated with concrete garages. “They would deprive municipalities of the power to require that at least some of the parking developers do choose to include is equipped to accommodate electric vehicles.”

Other ways forward

However, Pothen does point out that the goal of reducing urban carbon emissions is complex, and doesn’t just pivot on green building rules. Besides the elimination of parking minimums, he points to new planning rules that allow for more density by permitting missing-middle-type housing in areas once set aside for detached homes. “This is not, in a way, the absolute end of the world for Toronto’s sustainability efforts, because at least the current mayor and council have been willing to continue moving beyond just the Toronto Green Standard.”

In the aftermath of the passage of the law, Tabuns says municipalities may still be able to offer incentives for developers to voluntarily adopt green building targets, although he’s not confident that even such watered-down measures will survive the government’s campaign to purge climate policies aimed at the building industry. The Tories, as he puts is, “are not a particularly forward-looking bunch.”

John Lorinc is a Toronto journalist who writes about cities, climate and business.

The post Ontario’s Bill 98 strikes a final blow to Toronto’s green building policies appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Five environmental groups and one farmer’s union are working together to dissuade Health Canada from approving a new systemic pesticide that could prove harmful to bees, birds, small mammals and other organisms. The pesticide, called flupyradifurone, attacks the nervous systems of insects and has the potential to contaminate pollen, fruits and seeds of plants. Bees and other pollinators, for one, are already having a hard time coping with the effects of neonicotinoids, which is widely believed to be a major cause of mass bee die-offs. “Scientists have called for a global phase-out of neonics. The last thing we need is another systemic pesticide contaminating the environment,” said Karen Eatwell, a spokesperson for the National Farmers Union. Health Canada has initiated a public comment period on its proposed approval of the new pesticide, says the group, which includes the Sierra Club Canada Foundation and the David Suzuki Foundation. Comments are being received up to November 3.

32 countries at “extreme” risk of conflict

An analysis of 198 countries has identified 32 nations that are most likely to experience conflict and civil unrest as a result of climate change. Bangladesh was found to be the most at-risk country in the world, followed by Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Nigeria and Chad, as well as island nations the Philippines and Haiti. Perhaps even more alarming is that growth economies like Cambodia, India and Pakistan are also on the “extreme risk” list, raising an important question about how much climate change could destabilize our increasingly globalized economy. Maplecroft, the analytics company that produced the report, said that one unifying characteristic of all these economies is their heavy dependence on agriculture for job creation and growth. “Changing weather patterns are already impacting food production, poverty, migration and social stability – factors that significantly increase the risk of conflicts and instability in fragile and emerging states alike.”

85,000 buildings in NYC flood zones: Report

You can bet insurance companies are taking note of this one. A policy brief released this week from the Office of the New York City Comptroller has determined that 84,596 buildings and 400,000 residents in NYC now lie within the so-called 100-year flood plain thanks to the rising effects climate change. The building count more than triples the previous estimate from 2010 and represents property value of nearly $130 billion, according to the analysis. The new estimate came about because of the $14 billion in devastation caused two years ago by Hurricane Sandy. “With such immense value arrayed along the city’s coast, we must act now to make the necessary investments to protect our homes, our businesses and our neighborhoods from the future effects of climate change and the potentially destructive force of another hurricane,” the brief states. “While the costs of resiliency projects are high, investing in the city’s future will pay enormous dividends, both to our waterfront communities and our broader economy.” The brief follows a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists that urges eastern and Gulf coast communities to prepare for chronic flooding over the next 15 and 30 years. To assist with adaptation, New Jersey just launched its Energy Resilience Bank, also in response to Hurricane Sandy. The bank will spend $200 million (U.S.) toward development of distributed energy resources at critical facilities so they can stay operational during outages caused by extreme weather. As Corporate Knights’ Ashley Renders reported today, Canada isn’t immune to the expected rise in flooding events. Unfortunately, it is the only country in the G8 without overland flood insurance.

Climate depression… It’s real

If all of this news about flooding and conflict is getting you down, you’re not alone. Madeleine Thomas at Grist.org wrote an insightful piece this week pointing to the struggle some climate scientists, environmentalists, and other “frontliners” are having with anxiety and depression as a result of climate research. “From depression to substance abuse to suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder, growing bodies of research in the relatively new field of psychology of global warming suggest that climate change will take a pretty heavy toll on the human psyche as storms become more destructive and droughts more prolonged,” wrote Thomas. “For your everyday environmentalist, the emotional stress suffered by a rapidly changing Earth can result in some pretty substantial anxieties.” Corporate Knights had a story on this important but underreported issue in our Summer 2014 magazine. Two years earlier, we ran a feature looking at the impacts of climate change on the mental health of employees working at companies perceived to be contributing to or solving the problem.

Tall travellers of the world unite!

The problem tall people have sitting in airplane seats isn’t really comparable to climate change, but it can cause considerable stress and discomfort – particularly for long flights, and when the person sitting in front insists on permanently reclining their own seat. As The Economist’s business travel blog wrote this week, “Spending three hours wedged into a seat that cannot physically accommodate your legs may not technically qualify as medieval torture, but it’s a close call.” The blog points to the fact that many airlines now accommodate extra-large – that is, heavier – passengers by finding them a complimentary second seat that allows them to spread out. So, it asks, why not adopt the same policy, official or otherwise, for tall people? It’s a reasonable suggestion, and such a call for civility would only be fair. After all, tall travellers have a proud history of helping their shorter peers get their luggage into and out of overhead compartments. But as one of Corporate Knights’ Twitter followers replied, “KLM would go out of business” with such a policy. True, those Dutch folks are pretty tall. But we love them just the same.

The post Time to talk about the birds and the bees appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Rob Ford was the antithesis of an environmentalist. He never spoke of climate change or carbon emissions. The words “green energy” and “energy efficiency” weren’t in his vocabulary. When he talked about boosting public transit, it was in the context of improving life for people who drive. Indeed, he was determined to end what he called the “war on cars.”

I remember moderating a mayoral debate on the theme of “green government” during the 2010 campaign. Other than when he was slamming green energy for being too expensive – eliciting boos from the audience – Ford had this unique ability to not answer any of the questions directly or on theme. It was like we had four candidates seriously debating green issues and then, in the corner, was Rob Ford talking to himself about tax cuts and gravy trains.

Once Ford was elected, it was must have been a culture shock to bureaucrats who worked under previous environmentalist mayor David Miller, now chief executive of WWF Canada. Under Miller, Toronto became known internationally for its environmental leadership. Under Ford, Toronto became known internationally as the city with that crack-smoking, homophobic mayor that makes racial slurs.

A New Chapter

Now that John Tory is Toronto’s new mayor, what can we expect from him on the climate and environment file over the next four years?

For one, the words “environment” and “climate change” are again being spoken with what appears genuine concern and conviction. During his campaign, Tory talked about making Toronto a more sustainable community by boosting the city’s tree canopy by 3.8 million trees over the next 10 years. (Not to compare or anything, but motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson just revealed it aims to plant 50 million trees by 2025). Tory also wants to expand and improve maintenance of city parks, increase the number of green spaces, and revive the city’s 44,000-acre system of ravines – what he has referred to as hidden “crown jewels.” All welcome initiatives.

On energy, he has committed to creating a sustainable energy advisory board made up of local green energy, cleantech and sustainability leaders (Hey John, pick me, pick me!). The idea here is to get top advice on how to unlock energy efficiencies and where to embrace renewables as part of a plan to mitigate the city’s climate impacts. Toward that end, according to Tory’s environment policy, he would “work with other levels of government, partners and other jurisdictions on tackling climate change and its effects.”

One idea he has already put forth, long advocated by environmentalists, is the use of underutilized city assets and rights of way as locations for district thermal energy systems – e.g. geothermal, solar thermal or co-generation (biomass, natural gas). These systems could provide shared heating to buildings that are clustered closely together, and when developed across the city they would represent what Tory calls a “smart energy network.” It’s a more efficient way to supply heating, as countries such as Denmark have learned, and it has worked well in nearby communities such as Markham.

Also of particular interest is his plan to appoint an “environment advocate” for the city. This person’s job will be making sure environment policies are consistently applied – and coordinated – across all municipal departments, agencies, boards and commissions. The advocate will also have the task of developing a comprehensive climate adaptation plan for the city and its infrastructure, and a “realistic” and “achievable” plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from municipal assets, improve waste diversion, and lower the amount of toxins released within city boundaries.

Best of all, progress on all of this is supposed to be documented in a “Sustainable City Report” to be released annually. Tory has promised to present this report himself to city stakeholders. It will be important to hold him to it.

Transit Challenges

It is on transit, however, that Tory has attracted the most attention – partly because there’s a big question mark over how he expects to pay for his plan, named SmartTrack. It targets the creation of a new 53-kilometre, 22-station aboveground subway service, one that would basically piggyback an existing regional rail corridor that is already targeted for electrification. He ambitiously claims he can get this ready within seven years, and that it would make it easier for people living in the suburbs – e.g. Markham, Scarborough, and northwest Etobicoke – to ditch their cars in favour of public transit.

Environmentalists like portions of Tory’s plan, but say it doesn’t go far enough. They preferred candidate Olivia Chow’s plan to significantly expand bus service, which would increase transit options to more areas and do it faster and at less cost. An open question is whether Chow’s approach would have reduced or led to more emissions compared to Tory’s plan, given that most Toronto buses run on diesel fuel.

Tory was also criticized by what some described as an unambitious plan to boost cycling infrastructure in the city. He called for more separated on-road bike lanes, more spaces to park bicycles, and more money for maintenance of existing lanes, but he didn’t provide a sense of how much he would expand the network.

Chow, on the other hand, pledged to create more than 200 kilometres of new bicycle lanes, which would roughly triple existing on-road lane infrastructure. True, Tory didn’t put a number on kilometres, but his openness to cycling as part of a strategy to reduce congestion and emissions is still a good sign. He can be pushed on this.

As a city cyclist, my own thought is that downtown Toronto is a chaotic, terrifying place to ride a bicycle. More separated bike lanes would help, but the real problem is rampant, uncoordinated condominium and road construction that gives little, if any, consideration to the impact on cyclists and their safety.

Creating a Smart City

Throughout his campaign, Tory spoke frequently about building intelligence into the way the city operates. He’s a big fan of intelligent building management systems, smart traffic management, and other technologies that collect and make sense of data that can reduce congestion, lower building energy costs and make the city, its residents and its businesses operate more efficiently. “Toronto should be at the forefront of the implementation of these technologies,” stated Tory’s economic plan, in which he outlined his intention to use the “market pull” of the city to turn Toronto into a global research and development hub for “smart city technology.”

One problem, in Tory’s opinion, is that the city hasn’t been taking advantage of the massive amounts of data it currently collects, most of which isn’t available to the public. He has cited that New York City releases 10 times more open data sets to the public compared to Toronto. “We should work to double the available data each year for the next 10 years until we are truly a global leader,” according to his economic plan.

The saying “you can’t improve what you don’t measure” is probably etched in Tory’s mind after his years as president and chief executive of Rogers Cable, where keeping the cable firm’s high-speed Internet service competitive with offerings from Bell Canada meant constant number crunching and analysis in search of efficiencies and a market edge. It’s why Tory plans to push for real-time energy monitoring for all municipal buildings, where he says he will find $22 million in annual savings by his fourth year in office. On top of that, “we will see additional new opportunities for energy retrofits, based on solid, real and measurable data.”

Unfortunately, Tory doesn’t appear ready to support a call for mandatory energy benchmarking of private commercial buildings, despite movement in this direction from city council staff and recommendations from the Toronto Atmospheric Fund. Tory feels private building owners and operators will do this voluntarily if the municipality itself shows leadership on its own buildings. This is highly doubtful. There’s a reason why cities such as New York, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. all require commercial buildings over a certain size to report their annual energy use, and that’s because most of them – especially the laggards – won’t do it voluntarily.

We’ve had voluntary reporting for a few years in Toronto and it can only go so far. For energy benchmarking to be truly effective as a way to find efficiencies, we need all commercial and public buildings of a certain size playing by the same rules. Here’s hoping Tory has a change of heart on this issue, and supports doing in Toronto what world-class cities south of the border are already doing, with great success.

Will He Deliver?

I know Tory reasonably well. As a technology and telecom reporter at the Toronto Star when Tory was CEO of Rogers Cable, I had many opportunities to chat with him. We kept in touch when he was leader of Ontario’s PC Party and later when he was talk show host for Toronto radio station CFRB 1010. He invited me on his show a few times to talk about energy and technology issues.

From these interactions, I can comfortably say one thing: Tory is not a No Man like Ford. He’s a consensus builder. He has opinions on various energy and environmental matters, but he isn’t dogmatic about it. He doesn’t like to throw money into a burning house. At the same time, he seems to keep an open mind, and is willing to change his position when he hears a sound argument for doing so. He’s a fiscal conservative, but he’s thoughtful enough about matters that he knows that solving social and environmental problems can’t always been done using Bay St. metrics. Sometimes situations call for patient capital. Sometimes payback can take several years. Tory appreciates this – it’s even an approach his former boss Ted Rogers took when building, at huge expense, the country’s first national mobile phone network.

This, in my view, is encouraging.

As one Toronto environmentalist told me, “Overall, this is a very solid opportunity that we should all jump on.”

We’ll learn more over the coming weeks and months. Exactly who he selects as his “environment advocate” will offer key insights, as well as who makes up his sustainable energy advisory board. Tory’s first-annual “Sustainable City Report” will tell us if he’s serious or not, as will his demonstrated willingness to push Toronto Hydro into moving more aggressively on conservation and district energy.

This editor will be watching closely.

The post Did Toronto just elect a green mayor? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The province is creating what is essentially a buying consortium coordinated by Shared Services BC. It has pre-qualified LED street lighting suppliers and struck a volume supply deal with them, giving municipalities and other eligible public-sector organizations the ability to get dependable technology at a cost that is much lower compared to what organizations would pay if they made the purchase alone.

The multiyear procurement program will be able to support the deployment of 330,000 LED-based streetlights across the province, and offers a model for other provinces to follow.

LightSavers Canada, an LED program that’s part of the Canadian Urban Institute, will be providing B.C. municipalities access to case studies, workshops and training materials to support their transition.

Phil Jessup, director of LightSavers Canada, said his next mission is to get the Ontario government interested in backing its own province-wide LED street light program.

There’s little doubt that converting to LED street lights makes sense for municipalities. As Corporate Knights publisher Toby Heaps wrote in May, the lights are much more efficient than sodium lamps used today and last several times longer, reducing both energy bills and maintenance costs.

The biggest barrier to adoption, however, has been figuring out how to finance projects – that is, fund the upfront costs. Energy services companies have been emerging to reduce that barrier, making it possible for municipalities to pay off the investment through monthly operational and energy bill savings.

The B.C. program is expected to help reduce costs more through coordinated procurement.

LightSavers Canada’s goal is to see one million or 37 per cent of all street lights in Canada switched over to LED by 2016. Canada currently lags at just 5 per cent penetration, well below the nearly 15 per cent figure for the United States.

The post B.C. backs LED street lights appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The field of heritage preservation is shifting its attention from protecting old buildings to preserving the vibrancy of communities and responding to contemporary challenges, such as climate change.

And this is attracting a younger crowd of professionals and activists to the field who are interested in sustainability and culture, says Shannon Clayton, a junior architect at ERA Architects Inc. and co-founder of the Architecture Conservancy of Ontario (ACO) Next-Gen program.

“The greenest brick is the one that is already in the wall” has become a slogan for those who know how much energy and labor has already gone into existing buildings, says Clayton.

Heritage buildings were built during a time when energy was not as abundant and designers had to think about conserving heat in the winter and keeping buildings cool in the summer, all without using the mechanical systems that we rely on today, she says.

But the benefits of older buildings go beyond the natural light and floor-to-ceiling windows that many people desire in their homes and office buildings. Heritage communities also tend to be walkable and human-scale because they were built during a time when people were not dependent on cars and buildings were a lot smaller, says Clayton.

This, she says, is also good for small businesses that rely on foot traffic.

Until recently, heritage preservation has been focused on the practice of protecting and restoring buildings. It required years of technical experience, for example, to know what kind of mortar mixture would work well with different materials, says Sharon Hong, a heritage planner at ERA Architects.

But in the last few years, there has been a shift away from thinking about heritage as physical artifacts to a living and evolving thing, says Hong.

Heritage preservation is now about protecting communities that have had many years to mature and accumulate meaning—places where people can say, “culture happened here,” says Hong.

By expanding their definition of heritage preservation, Toronto Heritage has been able to draw in younger people with broader interests, says Karen Carter, Executive Director of Toronto Heritage, a charitable agency of the City of Toronto.

The ACO has also decided to do something about its aging demographic by launching a program called ACO NextGen, which helps young people connect with experienced professionals and hosts design charettes for students and young professionals.

Having young people participate in heritage preservation is refreshing, says Clayton. “The ACO is starting to value our little group…. They want to have younger members and fresh ideas. They want the organization to last.”

Most importantly, says Carter, it is important for young people to understand the history of their communities so that they can make informed decisions about the future.

“If you don’t take care of the identity of your city, it gets lost. And if young people don’t participate in creating that identity, they can’t own it,” says Clayton.

The post How heritage helps the planet appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But not all density is created equal, and there is such thing as too much density. That’s where many academic planning journals and right-wing think tanks start to cross the line. Many complain of too many restrictions that are keeping high-rise condos and business towers from blooming like weeds in a vegetable garden.

A series of recently published books have also perpetuated this view, some taking it to the extreme. Take the following excerpt:

“The environmental challenge we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world’s non-renewable resources, is not how to make our teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The true challenge is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan.”

That’s the pitch from The New Yorker writer David Owen, with his book Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability. He noted that New Yorkers use less energy per capita than anybody else in the U.S., so therefore we should all live like New Yorkers. After all, they all live in apartments with shared walls and mostly walk and take transit, saving a huge amount of energy compared to car-driving suburbanites. Forget light bulbs and insulation, Owen argues, what matters is density. It’s a line of reasoning picked up by every real estate developer building leaky glass condos.

For economist Edward Glaeser, nothing is sacred. He’s the writer of Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. If he had his way, he would demolish New York’s Greenwich Village and build 40-storey towers everywhere to increase density and the supply of housing. He is an economist, not a sentimentalist, and notes there is a price paid whenever we stand in the way of development: “Preservation isn’t always wrong – there is much worth saving in our cities – but it always comes at a cost.”

Alex Steffen, in his book Carbon Zero: Imagining Cities That Can Save the Planet, makes a strong case that the only way we are going to dig ourselves out of the mess we are in is to live in sustainable cities.

“Americans, Canadians and Australians, in particular, sail now on a collision course with planetary realities. Our sprawling suburbs and low-density cities depend on abundant resources, cheap oil, and low costs for pollution, none of which the future holds.”

But he, too, claims that to keep cities affordable, “we need policies that result in thousands, sometimes even tens of thousands, of homes built each year. This is basic economics.” He also objects to NIMBYs who are trying to save their neighbourhoods as standing in the way of saving the world.

The problem with all of these free marketeers is that at some point it becomes counterproductive – densities can get too high. Upgrading transit to service Manhattan densities is extraordinarily expensive; the new 2nd Avenue subway is costing $1.7 billion per kilometre, where a dedicated streetcar line like that on Toronto’s St. Clair Avenue cost $37 million per kilometre, one-46th the cost.

Ken Greenberg tells of another way, where one doesn’t have to throw legendary urbanist Jane Jacobs under the bus. In Walking Home: The Life and Lessons of a City Builder, he describes the virtues of a greener, denser, but still Jacobsean place where there is “a strong, deep culture of the city with a widely shared web of relationships, a deep bench of committed city champions and a long collective memory.”

What might life in our cities look like if we aggressively filled in the obsolescent rail yards and port lands, cleaned and remediated their polluted soils and built denser, more walkable neighbourhoods? Our living spaces might be smaller, but that would be compensated by a greater variety of public spaces, amenities and necessities close to hand, so we will likely spend less time in our own private spaces anyway.

Density is important and necessary to make a city work. But it can be too tall, too dense, too spiky. Too much of it can kill a neighbourhood or a city. As that great urban theorist Yogi Berra said, when describing a St. Louis restaurant he once frequented, “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”

The post Does dense equal sustainable? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The world is undergoing an enormous wave of urbanization. Students graduating today will see a doubling of the world’s urban populations within their careers. And almost all of the three billion new urban residents will live in the burgeoning cities of middle- and low-income countries – that is, “the south.” The world’s rush to urbanize is already having profound impacts on Canadian and U.S. cities, especially the larger metropolitan urban areas.

Today, 15 of the world’s 100 largest urban areas are in the U.S. and Canada. The Greater Toronto Area with 5.4 million people is the 50th largest city in the world and Montreal, the only other Top 100 Canadian city, is 87th. The U.S. has 13 cities in the Top 100 starting with New York City in sixth place.

Fast forward to 2050. Even though populations are expected to grow considerably in all cities, the U.S. and Canada will still lose three or four cities from the Top 100. Project further into the future and the Top 100 number drops even more. The projections are a little murky but a few things are clear. By 2100 Canada’s only large city, Toronto, is barely in the Top 100 list, hanging by the nails in 96th spot. The U.S. has only six. New York City is still the largest but drops to 22nd place.

Toronto is a good example of how North American cities are running ever faster yet still falling behind their global large-city peers. Linked to Toronto’s impressive growth, from 2001 to 2011 total annual passengers at the city’s Pearson International Airport increased from 28 million to 33.4 million. Despite this 20 per cent growth in annual traffic, in just a decade Canada’s busiest airport (by far) dropped in the global ranking – to 38th from 26th.

The growth in Asian air traffic swamps anything today happening in North America or Europe, and Asia is a precursor for Africa. The African continent is just getting started on its urbanization path. By around 2050 Africa will have more people living in cities than all of East Asia, and by the end of the century Africa will have as many people living in the Top 100 cities as the rest of the world combined.

Roughly speaking, the volume of Canada’s voice at the close of this century will be half what it is today, and most of the influence will come from Toronto. This is similar for the U.S., where most of the diminished remaining influence will be through New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Philadelphia and Dallas.

Clearly, Canadian and U.S. cities need a new approach if they are to continue to have global influence.

Not that bigger is always better, but when it comes to the global economy and international influence, large cities matter. Large cities are like stationary aircraft carriers within a country’s global power base. Big cities are the vehicles through which countries most influence global events. Big cities finance the soldiers, weaponry and embassies abroad while at home they drive the economy, patents, higher education and innovation. The world talks through its cities, and bigger cities almost always have a louder voice.

The selection of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio from Buenos Aires as Pope Francis is another example of how economic heft and influence are shifting away from traditional power bases like Europe, Canada, the U.S. and Japan. This shift of power presents enormous opportunities but also threats to the U.S. and Canada. The greatest opportunity is likely not the supply of commodities and agriculture products, but rather provision of urban services, institutional support, and working together with emerging markets to help cities develop and operate in a more sustainable way.

History repeating

The rise of North America’s big cities is illustrative as history looks to repeat itself, only this time in Asia and Africa. Of the world’s larger, more affluent countries Canada was one of the earliest and fastest to urbanize. Spurred by many young rural men enlisting (and heavy casualties in World War I), Canada surpassed the 50 per cent urban mark around 1921. The country’s fast-paced urbanization manifested in many ways; for example, with so few rural workers, Canada became a world leader in tractors and mechanized farming. Parts of the United States followed the same path.

Canadian and U.S. cities also owe much of their affluence and global stature to large-scale infrastructure. Big projects like Canada’s cross-continental Canadian Pacific Railway, the U.S. Interstate Highway System, Erie Canal, St. Lawrence Seaway, Hoover Dam, Tennessee Valley Authority, and the plentiful, reliable and cheap electricity from the Niagara River, for example, all led to tremendous economic strength.

There was much fanfare last month as Toronto proper nudged past Chicago to become the fourth-largest city in North America. However, the Greater Toronto Area is still three million people smaller than Greater Chicago. Overall urban area is a much better measure of the economic and cultural heft of a city than the inner core alone.

A few strategies for U.S. and Canadian cities emerge as the world’s centre of urban gravity shifts southward. If Toronto and Chicago strengthened partnerships, for example, they would emerge as even more critical urban centres for their countries. Greater Toronto and the rest of Canada will also need to work more closely together as Canada faces increased geopolitical and climate turbulence. Miami, New York City and Philadelphia present particular vulnerabilities. Sea level is expected to rise by 0.5 to 1 metre by the end of the century and all three coastal cities are located in common hurricane track paths. Miami and New York City are respectively the world’s first and third most threatened cities with $5.7 trillion in combined assets likely exposed to coastal flooding by the 2070s.

On their own, with their provinces and states, and occasionally with the help of their national governments, as well as through city associations like C40, Metropolis and ICLEI, all larger Canadian and U.S. cities are working in some way toward greater sustainability. Their key sustainability objectives include enhanced resilience and risk reduction, securing basic service provision such as water, food and energy, strengthened community involvement in city functions and for many cities a much greater focus on transportation (as these large cities compete globally they will need to effectively mobilize as many residents as possible across the urban area).

A newly emerging sustainability priority is the building of stronger and more cooperative international partnerships. Watch for pragmatic partnerships between cities like Toronto, Chicago, Dallas and New York City with cities like Sao Paulo, Bogota, Seoul, Jakarta, Beijing, Dar es Salaam, Lagos and Johannesburg. As most of the larger-scale climate, economic and security threats to Canadian and U.S. cities are common across the world, cities have a greater incentive to cooperate.

Continued economic prosperity for North American cities is mainly conditional on how well they can integrate themselves globally; how well they are able to influence improved urban service provision around the world; and, how well the systems and institutions they develop to meet the needs of sustainable development are emulated and exported. When your voice is about to be halved it’s important to ensure that your input is pragmatic, profitable for all parties and doubly persuasive.

One challenge all North American cities have in common is a severe infrastructure deficit. Cities like Chicago, Toronto, New York City and Philadelphia are like middle-age players that became soft in the belly. Transportation deficiencies are the most noticeable, but power, water and wastewater systems are also often sclerotic. While the cities of the south need new infrastructure, North American cities need extensive and urgent improvements to existing infrastructure. As an example, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel intends to spend $7 billion over the next three years just to start addressing the city’s backlog.

As the relative political influence of Canadian and U.S. cities falls over the next several decades, a new opportunity arises. More cities in countries like China, India, Tanzania, Nigeria and Indonesia will need expertise in urban service provision. Building and rehabilitating cities is the world’s fastest growing market and success benefits everyone. The worst thing North America’s big cities can do now is rest on the past. Efforts need to be redoubled to build better cities in our own countries, and then to export this expertise.

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These migrants arrive and settle in the fringes of cities, creating illegal interconnected neighbourhoods that risk being bulldozed over at any moment. The dwellings form the structure of “arrival cities” which function as a network, entry mechanism, urban establishment platform and social mobility path for people who want a better life for themselves and their family.

Saunders ventures through these dwellings, describing them as “unstable buildings elevated on stilts over open cesspits separated by shadowy passageways less than a metre wide, crawling with livestock and untended children,” and spoken to people who see these transient cities as an opportunity of achieving upward mobility.

Their current state of poverty is temporary; as residents identify as “successful urbanites who happen to be passing through a period of poverty, perhaps for a generation.” From his discussions with the residents of the arrival cities he has learned that the value of a cell phone is equal to that of kerosene and that these shantytowns and their inhabitants are not to be overlooked or ignored as they will become the city’s future lower- and middle-class residents.

Canadian author Doug Saunders is also a journalist with the Globe and Mail. His travels and background as a reporter provide the reader with rich detail and a wealth of information about the people and places he comes into contact with. However, his love of detail can overwhelm in Arrival City. Biographical narratives intersect with lessons on urbanization patterns, studies in linguistics (as in the ever-changing meaning of the word “job”) and demographic statistics, bolstered by footnotes. This flood of information, while interesting and thorough, at times detracts from the personal anecdotes that initially capture the reader’s attention. Nevertheless, his book proves to dispel the myths surrounding arrival cities while advocating their recognition and their preservation by the cities that they surround.

Arrival Cities‘ thorough nature also adds merit to Saunders’ investigations. He often returns to places, such as the Tower Hamlets in London to interview second-generation immigrants a decade after first visiting them to see how they have fared. These re-interviews allow for the reader to learn of the fortunes of these people and their neighbourhood, which, unlike some European countries managed to produce a continuous cycle of incoming and outgoing Bangladeshi Britons. Like a machine, these people enter the neighbourhood and soon gain upward and outward mobility, moving away from high-risk, labour-intensive jobs to careers in finance, politics, education and government. Still tied to their roots, they manage to send remittances back to their village. Saunders’ claim of the benefits of arrival cities is fortified by his diligence to return and recall what and who has changed at most of the places that he visits.

Saunders attests cities that put together funding and resources to promote “density, spontaneity and diversity” in the form of land ownership and citizenships have witnessed greater integration and growth both socially and economically. Such cities have led to a decrease in population growth and the empowerment of women who are both educated and employed. They have, however, led to the loss of the support system that an extended family provides, as is missed by Malian-born Alima inArrival Cities. She now lives in France, yet is reminiscent of the times she was “surrounded by extended family members who can help.”

While North American cities were the destinations of the largest international migrations that facilitated upward mobility through land ownership, Saunders notes that not all cities have been successful, citing Paris as an example. Cities that do not allow for the residents of their arrival cities to gain ownership of their lands end up with immigrants that cannot grow and flourish into “something that contributes to the country’s economy and culture.” Because of their last names and neighbourhood, the second generation French-born “immigrants” as they are still considered, are both marginalized and isolated. In France, this led to the riots of 2005, where the children and grandchildren of villagers incinerated cars, an object that symbolized one’s “mobility and success.” Their fight was one for acceptance, which they demonstrated by holding up their French ID cards in protest. Saunders’ ability to examine both the positive and negative aspects of arrival cities is refreshing, and key to this book’s relevance.

What is the future of arrival cities? Doug Saunders title implies that this migration is the final one resulting in the permanent reduction of rural cities worldwide. He predicts that by the end of the century more than three quarters of the world will have become urban, which is beneficial for both the people and the environment. The idea of humanity heading towards a permanent equilibrium seems debatable.When the urban economy falls, as it did in 2008, most immigrants return back to their home villages, as was seen by Polish villagers in parts of Europe and villagers from cities in sub-Saharan Africa alike. Predicting a permanent stable population in a time of turmoil and chaos is like trying to outrun a herd of wildebeest, near impossible.

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Given that I will be writing one post per month in the coming months I thought I should provide a brief summary of my background. I have a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado in Strategy & Entrepreneurship. After reading Natural Capitalism, I was inspired to focus on the intersection of sustainability and entrepreneurship. I taught and researched sustainable entrepreneurship at the Instituto de Empresa (Madrid, Spain) and UVIC, SFU, and more recently UBC. After starting a handful of green businesses on the side, I decided to resign from full-time academics to try my hand as a full time sustainable entrepreneur.

I have co-founded ventures in green building, green IT, and most recently, in carbon. In November 2009, I co-founded CO2 IMPACT to primarily focus on developing high quality carbon offset projects in the Americas. We have current projects in our portfolio in gasification and energy efficiency and coal mine methane capture. CO2 IMPACT also is in advanced stages of business planning for a bioenergy facility in Canada. In this column I will share some of my experiences from the trenches of the clean economy.

I have also been fortunate enough to coauthor the sequel of Natural Capitalism with Hunter Lovins. Our forthcoming book, Climate Capitalism: Capitalism in the Age of Climate Change seeks to shift the argument away from the absurd debate about whether climate change actually exists or if humans are partially to blame, and instead argues that whether you care about or believe that climate change is real, companies will make real profits in the shift to a low carbon economy regardless. In Climate Capitalism, we take a deep dive into many key sectors from energy efficiency and renewables to transportation, buildings, agriculture and even carbon markets and climate change adaptation. Given that Corporate Knights is the “Magazine for Clean Capitalism,” the fit couldn’t be better.

In this column I hope to share insights from the book as well as from my own experiences in the carbon markets and from the inspiring people I have met from North America to Latin America who are part of the transition to a low-carbon economy. Visionary business leaders from pioneers in gasification technologies like Nexterra to the latest corporate winners of Richard Branson’s Gigaton Awards, climate capitalists are already proving that low carbon solutions make good business sense.

If we can continue to show that businesses can make as much or more money by being part of the climate solution, we can turn the political tide too. We all know that money talks and the business lobby is a powerful force in Washington. Companies like Nike, Apple and PGE protested largely when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce began its lobbying campaign against climate legislation. These are early adopters who recognize that the world needs capitalists who promote, not fight, the shift to low carbon, and that in fact, the health of our economy depends on such a shift.

This column aims to help in spreading the word about individuals, businesses and even cities and governments who are proving that climate capitalism is the path to economic prosperity. It will also address emerging developments that impact opportunities for climate capitalists, such as recent developments with cap and trade policy in California and Ontario’s plan to phase out coal in the energy sector.

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Boyd Cohen is the CEO of CO2 IMPACT, a carbon origination company based in Vancouver, Canada and Bogota, Colombia. Boyd is also the co-author of the forthcoming book, Climate Capitalism: Capitalism in the Age of Climate Change.

This series will use the twitter hashtag #climatcaptlsm

The post Intro to climate capitalism appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Ironically, because of their urban “metabolism,” cities require only 85 per cent of the resources necessary to double in size, and they’re more energy efficient than rural communities.

A un-habitat report State of the World’s Cities 2010/2011 found that cities’ density and economies of scale provide more benefits to the environment than rural living— and could even reverse the impact of climate change by reducing per capita emissions.

This seems counterintuitive to the agrarian revolutionary who believes a return to rural communities is a solution to climate change. Urban living may increase our problematic reliance on destructive factory farming, but increased worldwide migration to cities is helping curb population growth because there is no need for large families for labour.

“When villagers migrate to the city, their family size drops, on average, by at least one child per family, often below the steady population rate of 2.1 children,” writes Doug Saunders in his recent book, Arrival City. “Without massive rural-to-urban migration, the world’s population would be growing at a far faster pace.”

As more people move to cities to find work, even though their family size shrinks, consumption rears its head. More people means a clamour for more food, energy, and products. According to West, the only way to keep the unsustainable urban machine going is the innovation produced by cities that constantly finds new resources to exploit.

The upshot is if we want to live in a sustainable world, we’ll need bigger cities, and more of them. As a physicist who applied his training to the study of urban environments, West believes we need more megalopolises.

But as we found in the fifth annual Corporate Knights Sustainable Cities ranking, not all cities are created equal.

We studied 28 indicators of sustainability in five categories—ecological integrity, economic security, infrastructure and built environment, governance and empowerment, and social well-being. Seventeen Canadian cities were surveyed, giving us a picture of the country’s urban sustainability.

Toronto, Vancouver, and Victoria won top honours in our Big, Medium, and Small city categories respectively. But many other cities boasted environmental programs that made them stand out, such as Edmonton and Whistler. While Whistler is not included in our ranking, the city deserves honourable mention for promising initiatives (see pg. 26).

Evaluating the complex 21st-century city is never easy. This is something University of Toronto civil engineering professor Christopher Kennedy knows all too well. Kennedy led a groundbreaking ranking of the greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) of ten global cities in 2009 called Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Global Cities. To help account for a city’s use of energy, Kennedy employs the idea of its urban metabolism, a framework that sees the modern metropolis as a kind of organism or ecosystem with flows of water, nutrients, and waste.

Gathering data from world municipalities, which are only beginning to request figures from energy companies, turned out to be a big challenge, he says. There are so many factors involved that it would be hard for anyone to simply say, “Hey, my city is better.”

For example, Toronto was the only Canadian city included in Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Global Cities, and it performed well against its North American counterparts, but only average overall because its cold climate drives up the use of its major source of emissions—natural gas.

Still, finding ways to compare cities’ sustainability is crucial, says Kennedy.

“When you look at a city’s metabolism, there are details that become apparent that you miss on a national level,” he says. “Many of the strategies for reducing environmental pollution or reducing greenhouse gas emissions more broadly come down to actions that have to be taken at some city scale, whether that’s at the metropolitan, municipal, or corporate level.”

Local programs, in other words, are the only way to have a national and global impact on carbon emissions. And our survey shows that Canadian cities are constantly seeking out new initiatives.

Vancouver stands out for its competitive commitment to sustainability, with its Greenest City Action Team initiative aiming to transform the city into the world’s greenest city by 2020. Victoria topped the Small City category, and matched Vancouver for highest numbers by developing its Victoria Sustainability Framework, making sustainability a guiding principle of all city business. For more on the winning cities, see page 29.

But we’re not just praising our top cities. Saint John deserves applause for its Green Thermal Utility plan, a multi-building project that would make use of renewable energy sources, such as waste energy from Irving Pulp and Paper. Looking to the future, with two phases to be completed in 2014 and 2017 respectively, the project aims to reduce emissions by over 16,000 tons of carbon dioxide.

Edmonton stands out in the biodiversity field. They joined the international Cities Biodiversity Index in 2010 and city staff is proactively monitoring hazard trees and invasive species. Montréal and Québec score points for retrofitting old buildings to make them accessible. They also stand out for developing “ecodistricts,” which aim to sponsor sustainable development within neighbourhoods. Considering Montréal’s 19 boroughs with separate councils and mayors, this is important.

Ideally all Canadian cities would have ecodistricts, and with the support of Partners for Climate Protection they just might. The Partners are a network that unites 211 municipalities (and counting), works on local sustainability initiatives and connects cities with funding from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ Green Municipal Fund.

Many city governments have positive sustainability initiatives, but municipal elections can complicate matters, to say the least.

Toronto’s new Mayor Rob Ford has proposed a subway scheme that Toronto Environmental Alliance (TEA) suggests would cost three times as much and serve half as many riders as former mayor David Miller’s Transit City. TEA’s findings stem from the Pembina Institute that states light rail would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 200,000 tonnes by 2031, compared with only 75,000 for subways. The Globe and Mail questioned whether the studies exaggerated Transit City’s benefits, but acknowledged the subway scheme was a step backwards.

Meanwhile, in a giant leap forward, Calgary and Hamilton have elected more progressive mayors. Traditionally conservative Calgary elected Naheed Nenshi, a Harvard grad whose platform was based on limiting urban sprawl and environmental protection. Likewise, Hamilton’s new mayor, Bob Bratina, has maintained the reputation he gained as a city councillor for supporting urban core development by increasing downtown density. These developments leave many people asking if today’s underdogs could leave Toronto behind next year?

With so much at stake, should we be waiting for government to lead the way on sustainability? Our cities are taking initiatives to explore renewable energy and sustainability frameworks that are far beyond Canada’s anemic national commitments. Yet the uncertainty over Transit City is a good example of how even well-intentioned, longterm municipal projects are at the mercy of regime changes.

Indeed, Vancouver writer and consultant Sanjay Khanna, Corporate Knights’ choice representative for social well-being, believes that resilience in the face of environmental collapse begins not in council, but deep within the self.

Our cities will need all kinds of innovation—especially the unconventional sort—if they are to come up with solutions that will allow them to grow sustainably in the long term. Cities are our most environmentally- friendly places to dwell, as well as our biggest cause of rampant consumption and waste. But it doesn’t have to be that way. With dedication and implementation, Canada’s cities can help resolve the urban paradox and make our urban metabolisms healthy.

Click here to go back to the ranking landing page. 

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