In Canada, cities like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver are leading the way in disclosing climate-related financial risks and leveraging municipal green bonds, fixed-income investments issued by cities to finance infrastructure resilience and climate initiatives. Toronto alone had raised more than US$1 billion in green bond issuances as of November 2023, the World Economic Forum (WEF) writes.

But the heightened risk is still out there. On January 14, in an industry first, S&P Global Ratings downgraded the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) two notches from a very secure AA- rating to an A, which remains secure, but with vulnerabilities.

S&P cited the “increasing frequency and severity of highly destructive wildfires within LADWP’s service territory.” One week earlier, ferocious urban firestorms had broken out across Los Angeles County. At least 29 people died, and damage estimates ran as high as US$275 billion.

Safe haven no longer

The immediate impact of the downgrade was that “bond values fell, default risk rose, and some bondholders sold at a loss,” E&E News wrote in February. But J.P. Morgan remained optimistic on long-term impacts: On February 18, the bank published an analysis titled “Municipal Bonds Today Offer U.S. Taxpayers a Rare, Compelling Opportunity.”

“We do not forecast any payment defaults to occur for any city, county, or school district adversely impacted by the Los Angeles fires,” North America’s largest bank wrote – a green flag for the individual investors who own 40% of U.S. municipal bonds, earning a yield that, for now, is exempt from federal taxes.

U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) expressed similar confidence one year earlier at a Senate Budget Committee hearing on climate risks to municipal bonds. The US$4-trillion municipal bond market, which is said to finance 70% of U.S. infrastructure – including schools and water and sewer systems – “is very resilient,” Grassley said in January 2024. “Where there have been defaults in municipal bonds, it’s been in places that have been mismanaged for decades,” he added, citing the city of Detroit as an example.

Grassley added that he was sure that U.S. municipalities were up to the challenges climate change poses: “Climate doomsday isn’t around the corner,” he said, adding that municipalities understand the risks and “are uniquely qualified to so adapt.”

But LADWP’s downgrading may herald “the beginning of a crack” in the country’s municipal bond market, Alice Hill, who served as U.S. National Security Council senior director for resilience policy in the Obama administration, told E&E. “We know that with climate change, there’ll be bigger and worse disasters that will affect communities’ abilities to repay those bonds.”

Municipalities in climate’s crosshairs

At the same Senate hearing, environmental data analyst Chris Hartshorn expanded on how climate impacts can strain municipal finances, warning of the delayed onset of harms following disasters like wildfires or hurricanes.

Five years after a fire, affected communities are “25% more likely” to experience a budget deficit due to declining revenue and increasing expenditures, while hurricane-stricken municipalities can see financial blowback up to a decade later, Hartshorn said.

Chronic impacts like heat – “a critical issue across much of the municipal U.S.” – can add to the financial grind, he added. K–12 schools are a particularly urgent concern, with an estimated US$40 billion of new air conditioning installation required to keep schools safe and productive for children in the United States.

Meanwhile, insurers are retreating from “higher climate risk,” Hartshorn said, citing states like Florida and California. The withdrawal has a domino effect on property values, which in turn reduces the property tax stream that underpins municipal debt servicing.

The diminishing of this “historically critical pillar of past disaster recovery” will heighten financial pressure on the municipal system after disasters, Hartshorn warned.

FEMA backstop pulled

At the hearing, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) compared municipal bonds to the 30-year mortgage, calling them “a bedrock” of the American economic system.

For decades, the U.S. Federal Environmental Management Agency (FEMA) has reinforced this bedrock by stepping in to fund disaster recovery, municipal market analyst Thomas Doe told E&E. “FEMA money would come in and provide the support for the rebuilding, and everybody’s made whole and the world goes on,” he said.

That status quo was more fragile than it might appear, Doe warned at the Senate hearing. “An industry pivot could be hastened if FEMA changes its criteria and raises more hurdles between disasters and federal aid, undermining traditional views of FEMA as a credit stabilizer.”

Now, making good on his presidential campaign promises, and his threats after the L.A. wildfires, Donald Trump is taking the axe to FEMA. Hundreds of FEMA staff have been laid off, and more losses are to come, especially among those who work on climate and resilience, the Natural Resources Defense Council wrote in February.

Canadian cities awaken to climate risk

In Canada, awareness of climate-related financial risk is gaining momentum. Gaby Kalapos, executive director of the Clean Air Partnership, sees a growing number of Canadian municipalities disclosing these risks as part of their financial planning.

A decade after the G20 created the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosure (TCFD), and four years after Canada’s pledge to integrate TCFD into financial reporting across the economy, cities like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver are “leading the pack,” Kalapos told The Energy Mix.

Toronto’s $1 billion will finance its goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2040, WEF writes. Funded by the Green Debenture Program, eligible capital projects will boost renewable-energy-generation capacity, energy efficiency and green building projects in the municipality.

Such positive developments are occurring even as climate damages rapidly worsen, Kalapos said. “It is not a matter of if climate impacts affect municipalities credit rating, but when,” she warned. “The risks are real, and repeated impacts will greatly reduce a community’s ability to recover.”

Strengthening climate resilience

Ujala Qadir, director of strategic programmes at the U.K.–based Climate Bonds Initiative, sees the sector-wide focus on climate risk as a positive shift, citing the move by S&P as the “shakeup” everyone needed to recognize that “the risks we thought were 20 years away are actually starting to materialize already.”

Qadir told The Mix that the conversation must now turn to “future-proofing” both municipalities and municipal bonds. This will naturally create a “virtuous circle” that builds resilience for both communities and bond markets.

Municipalities that embrace climate adaptation through green municipal bonds – as Toronto is doing – will further secure their credit ratings even as they protect households, businesses and infrastructure from destructive climate impacts.

“There’s a lot you can do, right? There’s so much evidence that investments in resilience and adaptation can actually prevent major losses,” Qadir said.

The Climate Bond Initiative is at the forefront of the green bond market’s evolution, with Qadir herself working to develop a “resilience bond,” the rigorous parameters of which would require issuers to “demonstrate a clear impact on reduction of climate risk.”

“We see this as a huge opportunity to expand the market of green and climate bonds to explicitly include resilience and really integrate that across the board,” she said.

This article was originally published by The Energy Mix. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original article here. 

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Olympic visitors will find Paris physically changed, and all the better for it. Crowded, dirty expressways along the Seine River have been “pedestrianized” into leafy walkways and picnic areas. The cacophonous Grand Boulevards with their eight lanes of traffic have been tamed, turned into two- or four-lane arterial roads flanked by bicycle lanes, grassy verges and widened sidewalks with more room for strollers, buskers and outdoor café seating. The speed limit on some streets is now just 30 kilometres per hour. Meanwhile, flowers and trees are flourishing in former parking spaces, while some streets, such as the fashion district’s Rue de Rivoli, are now entirely car-free. And according to Paris’s maison de ville, air pollution is down 40% over the past 10 years.

Having lived in Paris for six months in the 1980s, and again for a month this spring, I was surprised and delighted by the city’s transformation. In my old neighbourhood in the 11th arrondissement, you can now sit in a deck chair on the Place de la Bastille sipping an aperitif instead of dodging six lanes of traffic endlessly circling the July Column that celebrates three successive people’s revolutions. There is space to sit, reflect and breathe.

Planning professor Nicholas Klein of Cornell University recently told NBC News he expects many other cities to adopt policies similar to Paris’s, “because many of these measures have been really successful.”

Hidalgo, who was born in southern Spain and became Paris’s first woman mayor in 2014, likes to put her green revolution in historic context. “This takes us back to ancient times, when the river was the source of the city,” she reports in her book Breathing (Respirer). “Paris is building the city of tomorrow on the foundations of its history.”

In fact, she argues, the history of Paris is founded in bad planning. Paris’s narrow, overcrowded streets enabled the assassination of one of France’s favourite kings, Henry the Great, when his coach got stuck in traffic in 1610. A 19th-century writer called central Paris “an immense workshop of putrefaction, where poverty, plague and disease work in concert, where air and sun hardly penetrate.” It took Baron Haussmann, the powerful prefect of Paris in the 1850s, to raze 12,000 dilapidated buildings and replace them with the Second Empire architecture and Grand Boulevards for which Paris is now known – while modernizing the town’s fountains, viaducts and sewers and displacing 25,000 people in the process.

In Breathing, an edited version of an address she gave to the European Commission in 2018, Hidalgo says her work is rooted in concern for people – and returning to a more classic version of community. “When we give citizens the opportunities to remake their city, they make it softer, greener,” she writes. “So now we share space more fairly. The car is not necessarily completely excluded, but it is put back in its rightful place – the one that allows Parisian life to take off.”

Paris’s transformation has been quick, but certainly not painless. Hidalgo has had to fight the motor-vehicle industry, the European Union, numerous appeals and the hostility of motorists who consider it their right to drive anywhere they like. She’s won most of her battles by thinking big, building alliances – especially with other big-city mayors – and testing new concepts with temporary initiatives, such as restricting vehicle access on Sundays, that she hopes to make permanent.

Mostly, though, Hidalgo is driven by an intense concern for her residents’ well-being. Unlike many politicians, she bases policy on her firm conviction that vehicle pollution – especially from diesel engines, which account for 40% of fine-particle emissions – costs lives, not just through bad air but, increasingly, extreme heat. Indeed, a 2016 study by French health agency Santé Publique France found that nearly 48,000 people were dying in Paris every year from causes related to air pollution. “We will not die tomorrow from pollution,” Hidalgo writes in Breathing. “We are dying from it today. It is already the third largest cause of death in France, after alcohol and tobacco.” Her mission: “I can’t fix what we’ve already done, but I can do what we haven’t done yet.”

From the river to the streets

Step one in the greening of Paris came in 2001 with Paris Plages, a municipal initiative to transform parts of the riverbank into palm-tree-studded activity zones, for lounging and sports (albeit no swimming in the polluted Seine). Critics made fun of the effort, but Hidalgo, who was deputy mayor at the time, recalls it as “a first step in the reconquest of the riverbank streets.” In 2007, Paris invested €150 million in the world’s first self-serve bike-share project to get motorists out of their cars.

As mayor, Hidalgo created more than 550 kilometres of bicycle lanes, eliminated 50,000 parking spaces, and announced plans to phase out diesel vehicles year by year, starting with the oldest and most toxic vehicles, to achieve a full ban by 2025. The goal: to reduce transport-related emissions by 60%. She also turned the north-bank expressway into a pedestrian zone. A coalition of motorists’ groups and suburban voters opposed the closure, claiming the city had supplied inaccurate evidence about its impact on pollution and traffic reduction. Hidalgo’s team finally got the win by repositioning the action as a heritage conservation project.

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In 2018, Paris, Brussels and Madrid went to a European Union court to defend cities’ right to impose high emissions standards for vehicles on their streets. It was the era of Dieselgate, the scandal in which Volkswagen AG was found to have deliberately misstated its vehicles’ emissions statistics. Hidalgo charged national and European authorities with offering automakers “a licence to pollute,” accusing them of prioritizing the financial health of automakers over the health of their citizens. In December 2018, the court ruled in the cities’ favour.

Meanwhile, Hidalgo also pushed to host the 2024 Olympics (after a previous bid for the 2012 Games failed), sealing the deal by promising a community-based, eco-friendly event. On July 17, she made headlines when she led a group of about 100 officials, athletes and local people to go swimming in the Seine, following a billion-dollar cleanup that qualified the river to become an official venue for Olympic swimming events. As a future project, Hidalgo hopes to have the Seine recognized as a legal person – as some rivers around the world have already been certified, including Quebec’s Magpie River – to enable legal action to be taken against polluters.

Unfinished business

Much of Hidalgo’s work is still unfinished. In 2018, she began pushing for free public transport in Paris and its suburbs. It remains a controversial proposal.

Two years later, Hidalgo focused her re-election bid on the concept of the 15-minute city: creating urban neighbourhoods where virtually everything you need – places of employment, schools, shops and recreation – are no more than a 15-minute walk away. Critics complained of social engineering, but she was elected with 48.5% of the ballots cast. With that vote of confidence, Hidalgo embarked on another initiative: inviting residents to turn half of Paris’s remaining parking spaces into parks and vegetable gardens.

The Hidalgo revolution has been furthered by two recent issues in which she turned to referendums for support. In 2023, Parisians voted to ban electric scooters from the city’s streets – a once-promising green solution that worked only rarely and mainly resulted in tripping hazards. And in February, Parisians approved a tripling of parking rates for sport-utility vehicles, buying Hidalgo’s argument that SUVs should pay more because they take up more space than traditional “city cars.” Under the new scheme, cars weighing 1.6 tonnes or more will pay €18 (about $27) an hour in inner Paris. Hidalgo hopes that carmakers will get the message.

What can North American cities learn from the greening of Paris? That courageous leadership, clearly focused on the health and lifestyle benefits, can find support for actions to reduce the urban dominance of cars, highways and parking lots. Of course, Paris has one big advantage over most cities: one of the world’s densest metro systems, with 16 lines, 246 kilometres of track and 320 stations – as well as local and regional bus services. It will be hard to lure most North Americans out of their cars until they have rapid transit close by.

But even then, Paris is taking nothing for granted. It has four more subway lines under construction, it’s building more tramways and investing more than $60 billion in a regional transit system that will connect the surrounding suburbs – and save a lot of unnecessary trips downtown.

Just ahead of the opening ceremonies, the Paris Olympics look to be living up to Hidalgo’s commitment to be the greenest Games in history. The Games will have the smallest physical footprint in decades, reducing travel needs, with all sites connected by a 60-kilometre cycling network. (There will, of course, be zilch parking available.) Given the high emissions that accompany demolition and construction, only two new permanent buildings were constructed for these Games: an aquatics centre and an arena for badminton and rhythmic gymnastics. Many events will take place in temporary, no-frills stadiums located in parks and public spaces, such as the Place de la Concorde.

All venues have been connected to the electrical grid to eliminate diesel generators, and food services will focus on other plant-based menus. The organizers’ goal is to limit the Games to a carbon footprint just half the size of that of London 2012, which totalled 3.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Furnishings for the athletes’ village have been similarly greened, with furnishings made from recycled cardboard, bottletops and shuttlecocks. But the road to sustainability is never easy. Athletes arriving in Paris earlier this month rejected Hidalgo’s decision to use geothermal cooling in their quarters. Organizers compromised by allowing teams to order portable air-conditioning units – at their own expense.

Philanthropist Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City, has collaborated with Hidalgo on many projects. As part of a recent profile of Hidalgo in Vogue magazine, he noted that “change is always hard, and it often takes a while for the public to come around . . . [Hidalgo] never shies away from doing the right thing, even if it’s unpopular.”

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As car ownership took off in the 1950s, urban planners and engineers designed streets and roads around automobile travel, allowing suburbs and sprawl to proliferate along highways. 

Many parts of Europe avoided this car-centric approach. The Netherlands, which was quite car-friendly in the 1960s, rethought its roads after more than 400 children died in car accidents in 1971 and widespread protests called on the government to “Stop de Kindermoord” – or stop the child murder. During the 1973 oil crisis, Denmark figured it was better to use transportation methods that reduced its reliance on oil-producing nations. Ever since, both countries’ cities have led the world in their cycling infrastructure.

A growing number of congested cities in North America are now trying to rethink their streets in similar ways to make them safer and more climate-friendly, but they’re having to undo decades of entrenched engineering practices and standards that favoured cars. Some blame John Forester, a Californian cycling advocate, for those engineering standards. In the 1970s, Forester fought against rules that were introduced in the town of Palo Alto, in Silicon Valley, that forced him to ride in protected bike lanes and on the sidewalk, banning him from sharing roads with cars. He became highly influential, mobilizing cyclists against separate bike lanes and publishing an engineering guide that argued that roads should be shared by drivers and cyclists.

“There’s no question that the John Forester effect on engineering standards has been huge. And those engineering standards are still in the process of being revised,” says Kay Teschke, a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia who has done groundbreaking research on helmets and bike infrastructure. 

For decades after Forester’s efforts, much of the research around bike safety focused on helmet wearing and showed that, yes, if you’re in an accident while cycling, a helmet will lower your risk of head injury. But the sole focus on helmets neglected something studies later revealed: that proper bike infrastructure prevented cyclists from getting into those accidents in the first place. And research has also shown that a lack of separated bike lanes was the largest obstacle to people feeling safe cycling. 

“It’s a bit of a vicious circle,” Teschke says. “When you don’t have infrastructure, people don’t bike; they drive. And then the demand falls off for biking infrastructure. Kids don’t bike to school any more. Parents don’t bike. The whole thing compounds.”

Across the U.S. and Canada, the landscape for urban cycling is rapidly evolving. In some cities, like Montreal, things have shifted into high gear as holistic cycling networks with separate bike lanes are being built. In Washington, D.C., like a lot of North American cities, a combination of bureaucratic inertia and political pushback have kept cyclists in harm’s way. 

Like the legislative and vehicular congestion it’s known for, the progress of D.C.’s bike infrastructure has been slow when compared to international cities. So much so that of the G7 capitals in advocacy group PeopleForBikes’s 2023 rankings of the best cities for biking, Washington, D.C., ranked dead last. It came in 261st place overall in the ranking of more than 1,700 cities thanks to its dangerously disjointed bike lanes. Last year, 33 D.C. cyclists suffered major injuries in collisions, and three died. Cycling advocates admit that bike infrastructure has progressed a lot in the city over the last two decades, but its fragmented network of lanes is leaving cyclists exposed.

“By American city standards, D.C. is doing very well. By global standards . . . we have a long way to go,” says Colin Browne, director of communications for the Washington Area Bicyclist Association, an advocacy group that pushes for better cycling infrastructure. “There are a lot of places that you still can’t get to in a way that feels safe on a bike.”

D.C. has built approximately 167 kilometres of bike lanes, including just 39 kilometres of separated lanes. When the district looked to build a 2.5-kilometre separated bike lane on 9th Street, the project saw years of delays after a loud contingent of residents and business owners voiced concerns about losing parking spaces and the effects of bike lanes on their bottom lines. And cycling advocates are worried that a proposed project on Connecticut Avenue – a major thoroughfare that runs from suburban Maryland to downtown Washington, D.C. – will suffer the same delays.

“When they say the squeaky wheel gets the grease, they mean it,” says Elizabeth Kiker, executive director of the Washington Area Bicyclist Association. 

To counteract these forces, cycling advocates are organizing one-on-one conversations with business owners to explain the environmental, health and economic benefits of bike lanes. Getting support from within the business community is always a big step up, Browne says. And it’s hard to argue with the research: studies show that building bike lanes improves business in retail and restaurants and that taking one trip a day by bike rather than by car can lower your individual transportation-related carbon footprint by 67%.

When they say the squeaky wheel gets the grease, they mean it.

 

– Elizabeth Kiker, executive director, Washington Area Bicyclist Association

Advocates say policies that mandate separate bike lanes can help cut some of those arguments off at the pass. “It shouldn’t really be a debate at the start of every bike project – whether we’re going to [build bike infrastructure],” says Rebecca Davies, the city ratings program director for PeopleForBikes, which has released a legislative guide for lawmakers. “It should be about how we can [build bike infrastructure] in a way that best meets all of the needs of the community.” 

Mayor Muriel Bowser has helped spearhead a lot of the new cycling infrastructure in D.C., but advocates say her office has let bike-lane opponents stall important projects, such as the 9th Street one. 

Electing strong, consistent leaders who won’t let these kinds of arguments slow down bike infrastructure can be a huge part of the battle, say advocates, who point to cities like Montreal and Paris, where Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s government shut down a major road running along the River Seine to car traffic. 

“Without the political leadership, it’s hard to move quickly on anything,” Davies says. 

Lessons from Montreal

D.C.’s bike network stands in stark contrast to that of a city that has been an outlier in North America: Montreal. Quebec’s largest city boasts a network of more than 900 kilometres of bike lanes (717 kilometres of which are cleared of snow during the winter months and 218 kilometres of which are separated from car traffic) – and it’s building more. 

The city, which placed 57th in the PeopleForBikes ranking (and was the top-ranked large Canadian city), has had a bit of an active transportation renaissance in recent years under the leadership of Mayor Valérie Plante, whose Vision Vélo initiative plans to expand the bike network with an additional 200 kilometres of separated cycling lanes by 2027 and a network of high-capacity lanes called the Réseau Express Vélo.

Montreal built its first bike paths in the late 1970s, connecting a few parks. Cyclists later started pushing for paths that would take them to other places they needed to go. In the early 2000s, the city built westbound bike lanes on De Maisonneuve Boulevard in downtown Montreal. Simply having those paths made residents see what was possible, and from there, they wanted more. “You can see a progression in the bike infrastructure in Montreal that shows what can be done,” says Stéphane Blais, the director of research and consulting at Vélo Québec, an advocacy organization. 

It’s taken a while since its first bike paths for Montreal to build out its infrastructure, but things have been accelerating in recent years. And electing a staunchly pro-bike mayor has gone a long way in getting good bike infrastructure built. Advocates say that the city, under Plante’s leadership, refocused its efforts on bike infrastructure that is separate, rather than simply painting “sharrows” on the roads. The city is looking to expand popular bike lanes that opened on Saint Denis Street in 2020. 

You can see a progression in the bike infrastructure in Montreal that shows what can be done. 

 

– Stéphane Blais, Vélo Québec

Beyond electing the right leadership, bike advocates in Montreal say it’s important to have meaningful consultations on bike plans to figure out exactly what communities want. “So every time people are arguing that we’re taking away space for not the right reason or that we should put it on another street, we go back to these consultation nights and say we heard what people had to say, and this is what they wanted,” Blais says. 

It’s also vital to have officials go door-to-door to explain the new infrastructure that’s coming. But the point is not to restart the whole debate on whether the infrastructure is necessary. “You are not consulting people [at that stage] on whether we need a bike lane or not,” Blais says. “You’re consulting people on small issues that maybe the designer didn’t see.”

And rather than making the debate about bikes versus cars, Blais maintains that we should be talking about the fact that these kinds of projects simply provide more choice for how people can get around a city. 

Blais says that within three to six months of a bike lane being built, the anger tends to dissipate and people tend to see the benefits and forget what it was like before. 

Blais and many other Montreal residents now bike with their children down streets that they would never have imagined biking down just a few years ago. With any luck, that will also be the case for a growing number of Washington, D.C., residents and cities across North America as the bike infrastructure grows. 

“We’re really fortunate to live in this period of time when a lot of change is coming,” Blais says.

This story is part of the Sustainable Cities package in our Spring 2024 issue. 

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For all that, Montreal struggles to meet its ambitious carbon reduction targets, says Blaise Rémillard, manager of planning and mobility at Conseil régional de l’environnement de Montréal (CRE Montréal), an environmental watchdog group. “We have a lot of good plans and a lot of good targets,” he says. But Montreal’s carbon has climbed since the pandemic, and the prospect for hitting the 2030 mark – 55% below 1990 levels – seems poor. “We don’t really know how we can do a reduction of about one-third of emissions within the next five years.”

The City of Toronto also has an expansive net-zero plan, dubbed TransformTO, as well as one of North America’s few municipal policies (the Toronto Green Standard) designed to push builders to drive energy efficiency beyond the low bar in the Ontario Building Code. But it suffers from the same dilemma. TransformTO, says Sarah Buchanan, campaigns director at the Toronto Environmental Alliance, “still doesn’t have the energy, funding and oomph behind it to make it do what council committed to.” Case in point: city council finally approved, but has not yet allocated funding for, a waterfront LRT meant to provide transit access to existing and planned high-density developments on Toronto’s de-industrialized port lands.

A few other cities have fared better when it comes to putting their money where their mouths are. Halifax Regional Municipality last year imposed a climate change tax as a pillar of its broader sustainability strategy, dubbed HalifACT. “At the time, it was the only one of its kind across Canada, and that had some really contentious public support,” says Kortney Dunsby, sustainable cities co-ordinator at the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax. The funding has gone toward investments such as building retrofits.

However, recent population growth and housing price spikes in the Halifax region appear to be driving sprawl as developers snap up cheap land along the region’s edges, with little resistance from the municipality and little in the way of transit investment to service those emerging communities. “Greenfield development [i.e., building projects on completely undeveloped land, such as farmers’ fields] is becoming a conversation, which is sometimes at odds with our climate plan,” observes Ahsan Habib, a professor at Dalhousie University and director of the Dalhousie Transportation Collaboratory.

The problem with city climate plans

As Canada has become more urbanized, greenhouse gas emissions from Canadian urban communities have declined by 17% from 1990 levels. Meanwhile, emissions from the rural economy – heavy industry, mining, oil and gas, agriculture and intercity transport – have increased by 30% over the same period. Since 2005, moreover, urban emissions have fallen by more than a quarter, while rural emissions from those same sectors have remained stable. Both statistics show that cities are driving Canada’s progress toward its 2030 targets.

Still, there’s a chasm between what municipal climate plans call for and what they actually deliver, and that fact of urban life is not new. Sustainability consultant Jeb Brugmann, the founder of Resilient Cities Catalyst, describes it as “the implementation gap,” adding that this type of shortcoming stems from the fact that municipal climate strategies originally took hold among planners. “Part of the planning conceit,” he says, “is that if you do planning, somehow it triggers implementation.” In his experience, climate plans falter because city officials don’t follow through by then doing the hard work of hacking through the Gordian knot of regulatory and cultural obstacles to change.

Others point out that these strategies may do little more than reinforce actions cities were already taking. A decade ago, then–McGill University geographer Adam Millard-Ball did a deep dive into the climate plans and policies for 600 U.S. cities and concluded that in most cases, they simply reflected the prevailing political preferences of individual cities, and spelled out actions that would have likely happened with or without an overarching strategy. 

“Cities with climate plans have had far greater success in implementing strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than their counterparts without such plans,” he wrote in the Journal of Urban Economics. “They have more green buildings, spend more on pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, and have implemented more programs to divert waste from methane-generating landfills. I find little evidence, however, that climate plans play any causal role in this success.” 

Part of the explanation for the buyer’s regret with climate plans can be found in the tangle of overlapping jurisdictions that touch the climate file and make it exceedingly difficult for cities to drive ahead with solutions. In Montreal, mobility-related emissions have remained stubbornly high because the province continues to pour money into highways. While EV adoption is impressive thanks to subsidies and the deployment of charging infrastructure (see p. 38), EV owners will drive instead of taking transit, which remains a far more climate-friendly solution. 

As for energy, Montrealers rely in part on cheap natural gas because Hydro-Québec has long exported the province’s surplus hydro power and relied instead on “peaker plants.” (Even though 94% of the province’s electricity capacity is hydroelectric, fossil fuels account for more than half of all the energy consumed in Quebec.) Rémillard describes Quebeckers’ view of natural gas as “complacent.” In Toronto, the city incentivizes builders to disconnect from natural gas, but the provincial government has continued to expand Enbridge’s gas distribution network. 

[TransformTO] still doesn’t have the energy, funding and oomph behind it to make it do what council committed to.

 

– Sarah Buchanan, Toronto Environmental Alliance

What’s more, the story of hobbled city-driven climate mitigation or adaption plans is also a function of regulatory inertia. In most jurisdictions, for example, building codes – that is, minimum standards for fire and structural safety, energy efficiency, et cetera – are set at the provincial or state level, which means municipalities are limited in how effectively they can push developers, using their own permitting systems, to reduce building-related carbon.

Of course, emissions don’t care about administrative borders. Yet administrative borders determine municipal climate action plans, such as transit investment. The result is that suburban areas, which tend to be car-dependent because of sprawl-oriented planning policies made decades ago, may care much less about spending on transit, not necessarily because their mayors and councils are climate dinosaurs, but because transit infrastructure in low-density areas is incredibly expensive.

The analysis becomes even trickier depending on what type of urban carbon we’re choosing to measure. According to a 2020 peer-reviewed study published in the journal Sustainability, city climate strategies typically focus on the production of carbon, via tailpipe emissions, energy generation and so on. But if you widen the focus to include consumption-related carbon – for instance, carbon generated by the manufacture and distribution of consumer goods purchased in the city, everything from food to consumer electronics, and including the supply chains that lead to urban markets – the total is considerably higher. Paradoxically, cities with ambitious climate plans may also be wealthier, which means more consumption and thus more carbon.

All of these cross-currents butt up against one of the more dominant strains of climate politics, which is that global cities and their mayors have established themselves at the vanguard of carbon reduction, often in response to the lack of effective policy from national governments. Organizations like the C40, an international network of sustainability-minded cities, work hard to promote ambitious strategies, pilot projects and technologies that have moved the needle in various metropolitan areas. 

Tough questions hover around the achievability of these urban sustainability goals that depend primarily on government investments but lack proper enforcement mechanisms and penalties. Some cities are beginning to think in those terms. At the Toronto Environmental Alliance, Buchanan points out that the City of Toronto is looking at a proposal to compel the owners of larger commercial structures to disclose their carbon consumption – a figure that, theoretically, might cause tenants to think twice about energy-inefficient buildings and the unnecessarily high energy costs they may incur in their lease arrangements. Eventually, she adds, landlords may face fines or fees for failing to upgrade their buildings, but city council hasn’t signed off yet on such a move.

There’s evidence from elsewhere that tougher policies do work. In New York City, for example, Local Law 97, which was enacted in 2019 and comes into effect this year, sets emissions caps on buildings of a certain size, with non-compliant landlords facing hefty fines. The regulation applies to 50,000 properties that exceed 25,000 square feet in total area. City officials say the vast majority of landlords have already moved to comply with the 2024 target reduction, but they’ll have to push even further to satisfy the 2030 benchmark (40% reductions).

The other conundrum is whether overly broad city climate plans become bureaucratically unmanageable because of their breadth of ambition – the “too much body/not enough blanket” problem. Asked to identify the most impactful municipal climate policy, the Ecology Action Centre’s Dunsby replies, “In planning, we call these wicked planning problems.” Halifax’s housing crisis isn’t unique to this city, she adds, “but I do think that focusing housing development in already serviced areas and focusing on trying to build out truly complete communities – mixed-use, walkable, transit-oriented development – would truly help to reduce our community-scale emissions.”

A large body of evidence confirms that land-use planning and development that drives density is, in fact, among the most effective ways to cut urban emissions. In a paper published this spring in the journal Cities, an American-Mexican team of geographers scrutinized land-use regulation in 431 urban areas in 40 countries. “Our findings confirm that dense, compact urban areas, with built-up downtowns and shorter roadway segments, have lower per capita carbon emissions,” they concluded, adding that restrictions on intensification, such as the protection of low-rise neighbourhoods, fuels sprawl and all the carbon that sprawl brings.

But both Buchanan and Dunsby caution against the notion that there’s a silver bullet when it comes to decarbonizing cities. “The investment in accelerating housing development and density has to come at the same time as investing in really high-functioning, efficient and reliable transit systems,” Dunsby says.

[Burnaby’s Metrotown is] a very unique hub. That ain’t no 15-minute city. That’s a five-minute city.

 

– Jeb Brugmann, founder, Resilient Cities Catalyst

Indeed, Ahsan Habib and many other climate-conscious planners argue that cities need to make decisions on how they grow and develop in lockstep with investments in green transportation infrastructure. “Whenever we are growing certain parts of the city, do we have a plan in place to move those people [and] achieve certain target modal splits [i.e., the proportion of people who travel by transit, bike or foot as opposed to cars]? If we do that, there is no chicken-and-egg problem.”

Brugmann points out that in some cities, strong political leaders have broken down silos that too often stand in the way of urban climate action. He cites the case of Curitiba, Brazil, where a long-serving mayor with no patience for official plans used his power to build an extensive bus rapid-transit network, a formula now in use in many large Latin American cities. 

He also cites examples closer to home, such as Metro Vancouver, where far-sighted planning and investment led, over three decades, to high-density development in the West End and impressive intensification around the expanding SkyTrain network. Brugmann lived for several months in Metrotown – a dense, transit-oriented community in Burnaby that’s grown up over the past two decades or so and seems to be delivering on the vision of a compact, pedestrian-friendly community connected to the region by transit. “It’s a very unique hub,” he says. “I’m telling you, that ain’t no 15-minute city. That’s a five-minute city.”

For our spring issue, Corporate Knights looks at a handful of urban indicators – greenhouse gases per capita, tree canopy and EV charging infrastructure – in eight large cities across Canada. Check back here for more city  features from our Spring 2024 issue. 

John Lorinc is a Toronto-based journalist and author specializing in urban issues, business and culture. 

The post Are cities losing their green mojo? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Vulnerable and underfunded, municipalities are making brave, future-driven decisions – on climate mitigation, sustainability and inclusion – that put more senior levels of government to shame.

Chicago, for instance, just adopted its first citywide plan in more than 50 years. “We Will Chicago” is a 10-year initiative intended to promote equity, resiliency, neighbourhood growth and “a sense of belonging” for all. Diverse planning groups spent three years devising 150 objectives that span eight “planning pillars,” ranging from arts and culture to climate and energy. Development commissioner Maurice Cox says that “We Will represents the hopes and dreams of Chicagoans for a more equitable and resilient city.”

The program’s first priority: boost climate resiliency efforts in overburdened communities and for low-income individuals.

On a smaller but symbolic scale, Toronto’s city council turned heads in February by overruling then-mayor John Tory by voting 22–3 to make bicycle lanes a permanent fixture along midtown Yonge Street, a key traffic corridor. While Tory pushed for more research, Councillor (and former Ontario environmental commissioner) Dianne Saxe declared that it’s time to “rip off the Band-Aid” and choose pedestrians and cyclists over cars.

Calgary, a city in a flood plain whose historic annual temperature (4.3°C) is expected to double to 9.5°C by 2100, is piloting a new AI tool that collates satellite imagery, heat maps and demographic data to identify the communities or building sites most vulnerable to flooding or extreme heat.

Ontario’s Peel Region – the Toronto suburb whose population is expected to grow by more than 50% in the next 25 years – is next in line to use this tool, which helps planners and developers make better decisions and incorporate natural assets such as green roofs, parks and water bodies.

In the U.S., cities as varied as Baltimore, Buffalo, Tampa and Little Rock, Arkansas, are working to reconnect urban areas divided by ugly, unhealthy expressways built in the 1960s and ’70s – primarily running through marginalized communities. While the Inflation Reduction Act is providing US$1 billion in funding, cities have been called “the tip of the spear” in devising creative, sustainable solutions – such as a 12-acre green “deck plaza” that El Paso, Texas, has designed to cover a swath of Interstate 10.

For years, Ottawa residents have complained about a transport truck corridor that runs through a popular downtown tourist and residential neighbourhood just east of Parliament Hill. In
February, the Canadian Association of Physicians upped the ante by submitting a complaint to the provincial government, calling for an investigation into the route. The complaint will trigger a probe by the Ottawa medical officer of health into whether the trucks’ diesel fumes are a hazard to residents’ health.

Shakespeare got it right 400 years ago: “The people are the city,” and cities that don’t put people and environment first can expect growing opposition.

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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.

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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.

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Fast forward to 2022, and Chicago is taking bold steps to update its CAP. Collaborating closely with WSP USA, the city is adopting a new approach that aims to reduce carbon emissions by 62 percent by 2040. Together, Chicago and WSP pioneered a model that centers equity and environmental justice within core climate strategies and introduces measures to help the city adapt to the impacts of a rapidly changing climate.

The vision for the CAP required the important and intricate work of centering equity at its core, which meant honoring the input of frontline community members and arranging technical analysis and solutions around their perspectives. Despite the COVID-19 disruption to in-person community sessions, city staff rapidly arranged alternative approaches for community involvement. WSP helped translate technical information for public consumption during virtual town halls and working group sessions and listened carefully to the insights and priorities of Chicagoans.

The broadly inclusive process was itself a means to spark change. So were many of the equity and environmental justice-focused interventions that resulted, notably:

• Equitable, affordable access to electric vehicles, clean transit and broadband networks
• Electrification of municipal, commercial and industrial fleets to reduce air pollution, with a focus on high-pollution, low-income transportation corridors
• Implementation of nature-based climate solutions to store carbon, restore ecosystems, improve air and water quality, and reduce the heat island effect, which disproportionately impacts communities of color — a related change is the expansion of the air quality monitoring network)
• Waste diversion from landfills and pollution-heavy processing, with a view toward more equitable burden-sharing among Chicago communities
• Residential building retrofits, including options for rental housing, and connecting diverse communities to renewable energy power and storage options
• Workforce development strategies to promote inclusion and diversity and expand the clean energy labor force

Based on that valuable and extensive input, the project team shuffled carbon strategies and adoption thresholds to align science-based emissions reduction levers with initiatives that deliver the most meaningful health and economic inclusion benefits to Chicago’s most vulnerable communities.

By pairing technical expertise with a deep and earnest commitment to community involvement and equitable outcomes, this partnership enabled greater learning, smarter work, and production of a more remarkable plan. WSP contributed well-beyond the role of technical advisor and providing GHG modeling, by lending analytical skills to evaluate climate actions for their contributions to local and equitable co-benefit, developing narrative content and supporting the lauded graphic design of the CAP.

The resulting 2022 Chicago CAP establishes a roadmap to bold action and represents a vanguard of next generation climate action plans anchored in inclusion, collaboration and good use of alternative funding. The plan aims to deliver multiple, meaningful benefits to more than 2.8 million residents — as well as hundreds of businesses and dozens of academic institutions — in 77 distinct communities.

The CAP is built around five key pillars that can fundamentally transform the city’s energy, transit, housing stock, labor market and more. Backed by high-impact strategies and clear action steps, the plan’s pillars and associated GHG reduction contributions are:

1. Increase access to utility savings and renewable energy, prioritizing households (8 percent)
2. Build circular economies to create jobs and reduce waste (3 percent)
3. Deliver a robust zero-emission mobility network that connects communities and improves air quality (6 percent)
4. Drive equitable development of a clean-energy future (45 percent)
5. Strengthen communities and protect health

To achieve these goals, the city will implement wide-ranging strategies that include policy and physical infrastructure to electrify buildings and vehicles; decommission power from fossil fuels; reduce waste and landfilling; make walking, biking or mass transit viable options for all trips; encourage equitable transit-oriented development and enable zero-emission transit and fleets; and facilitate community adaptation to climate impacts.

These strategies advance Chicago’s transformational sustainability journey and have great promise for delivering co-benefits such as greater economic inclusion and reduced costs for the city and its stakeholders, a just transition to renewable energy and more equitable access to critical infrastructure and natural spaces, a reduced pollution burden that can directly improve human health, and enhanced community connectivity and resilience.

Recognizing that low-income communities and communities of color are often the most overburdened by environmental impacts and least equipped to withstand and recover from them, the plan also serves as a deliberate reckoning with the past and is intentionally designed to meaningfully advance equity and inclusion.

The 2022 CAP was jointly developed with guidance from various departments and City-community collaborations to ensure that actions were complementary to existing efforts while also setting new ambitious targets. Building upon the city’s established extreme heat emergency response plans and strategies with actions including planting over 75,000 trees, minimizing hard pavement, and maximizing green space, the plan speaks to the need for neighborhood-level resiliency efforts.

The plan also addresses other increasing climate risks, including frequent heavy downpours that cause flooding, transit disruption and sewage overflows and contamination of local waterways; changing Lake Michigan water levels and temperatures that increase shoreline erosion and property damage; and extreme winter weather that may restrict mobility and impact the availability of energy and lifeline services.

This forward-looking 2022 Climate Action Plan promises to transform the social, natural and built environment in Chicago. It is helping the city evolve to reduce risks, better rebound from the increasingly severe chronic stressors and frequent climate shocks and promote economic and human health for generations to come. The plan is a testament to the power of community-led change, thoughtful collaboration, and cutting-edge technical expertise to deliver transformational results in the fight against climate change. By prioritizing equity and inclusion in the development and implementation of the CAP, Chicago is setting an example for other cities and communities to follow. The path towards a sustainable and just future may not be easy, but with bold leadership and collective action, it is within reach.

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