It was the enviro slogan of the last generation: “Think globally, act locally.” Now it’s increasingly coming to life as cities emerge as the new powerhouse of sustainability thought and action.
It’s not that governments at other levels don’t have roles to play; obviously the municipal level can’t get a full policy lock on a something as vast as climate change. (Of course, no single government alone can manage that, but that’s a different story.)
Municipalities, however, are where both problems and opportunities related to sustainability hit the ground. Whether they’re focused on carrots or sticks, folks in municipal administrations – and their partners in local business associations, local academic institutions and place-based non-profits – are being compelled to figure out sustainability’s nuts and bolts, even if the whole invention remains hazy.
As they do, they’re providing leadership worth noting, since it’s likely to trickle up (or at least create its own set of carrots and sticks).
That was the starting point for the recent Gaining Ground summit in Vancouver, titled “The Power of Green Cities to Shape the Future.” Without pretending to be remotely comprehensive, here are a few points the forum raised.
The estimated cost to the San Francisco airport of a one-metre rise in sea level is a whopping $48 billion. The increasing frequency and severity of extraordinary weather events (storms, floods, wildfires) threaten to overwhelm municipal services such as roads and sewers and emergency services.
As Jared Blumenfeld of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency commented, “Overnight, hurricane Katrina turned New Orleans into a third-world country.” This burden of increased infrastructure risk falls heavily on the shoulders of municipalities.
Since the venerable Lloyd’s produced its 2006 report on climate change risk entitled “Adapt or Bust,” warning that the insurance industry would go out of business if it didn’t embrace the reality of climate change, the industry has taken note. Which means cost structures will be increasingly in flux, and for entities that rely on property taxes, revenue structures will, too.
Blumenfeld also commented, “If you can’t get insurance on a house, you can’t get a mortgage.” What, he asked, will cities do when insurance companies refuse to insure entire neighbourhoods located in 100-year flood zones?
The shared territory of the global atmosphere makes it a policy conundrum for those focused at the Kyoto and Copenhagen levels.
But whatever happens, the impacts of regulatory policy will be felt at the city level: cities produce 80% of the world’s greenhouse gases. (Even those well-scapegoated methane-farting cows out on the farmland are being raised in order to provide burgers and cheese – to people who live in cities.)
Speaking of food, cities in some ways have a clearer picture of what it takes to make sustainability happen than do other levels of government, simply because they are closer to the land. Issues of local food, clean water, mitigating sprawl and protecting ecosystem resources are visible and meaningful to both constituents and policy-makers at the local level.
One speaker, Carol Sanford of Developmental Economies Group International, argued against strategies that don’t work in a systemic way natural to a geographic place – that are grouped by analogous characteristics or that are “one size fits all,” based on “best practices,” but disregard how local living systems operate. She advocated approaches to development that are “place-sourced.”
Our own mayor put this one out there – that cities are developing and testing the new policy approaches likely to inform other governments stymied by more diverse, far-flung and competing interests.
Meanwhile, Blumenfeld gave examples from San Francisco: a one-cent fee on cigarette butts used for litter cleanup; the banning of plastic shopping bags (which, he says, has netted not a single complaint from shopper or vendor); banning phthalates in children’s toys (which resulted in lawsuits and policy decisions right up to the federal level); connecting jobs- training programs to incentives for the installation of green roofs (hire a training program graduate to do the work, get the rebate).
Beyond just a relationship with geography, cities have something else critical to sustainability – the ability to foster meaningful personal connections and relationships, and through them, collaboration and trust.
Add a little civic pride into the mix, and you can start to see the possibilities.
The Urban EcoMap (www.urbanecomap.org) now being implemented in Amsterdam and San Francisco, allows people to compare the CO2 emissions of two different zip codes within their city.
A speaker from Cisco spoke about his vision for an “urban services platform” that would provide real-time data about a city’s “metabolic activity” – not only to the city manager but also to all of its citizens.
If you could see the impact of leaving your car at home on the air quality your kids will breathe downwind at their school, you might make different choices. Home, after all, is where the heart is. No wonder cities may lead in this multifaceted value shift.