Recently in Climate Change Category

With the 2010 Winter Olympic Games as the setting, Virgin Airlines CEO Richard Branson, has invited cities including Vancouver to join a public-private consortium against global climate change. The idea is to use Branson's Carbon War Room to rally cities as a vehicle for financing and capacity building, maybe a Keiretsu among Vancouver, San Francisco, Copenhagen, Chicago, London and Portland with whoever else walks down the tarmac from a corporate jet.

Sir Richard lauded Vancouver for reducing carbon emissions to 1990 levels, which it accomplished while increasing population 30 percent. According to the Vancouver Sun, Jose Maria Figueres, chairman of the Carbon War Room and former president of Costa Rica, the group is trying to, "create a new blueprint for the creation of jobs, driving economies and greener cities around the world."

The Carbon War Room wants to harness the power of entrepreneurs to implement market-driven solutions to climate change. The war, according to their website, operates on "seven fields of battle": electricity, transport, built environment, industry, land use, emerging economies and carbon management.

Branson also mentioned the depletion of oil in a speech, and the need to switch to alternative fuels. A new report funded by Virgin Airlines predicted shortages of oil in the global market by 2015, a prediction made by a former Shell oil CEO and reported here previously.

It's not clear how the Carbon War Room will work with governments, whether it's cities or other government entities. An example of a project or even a potential project would make the whole thing more real.

Vancouver under Mayor Gregor Robertson vowed in October to become the world's greenest city by reducing its environmental footprint by a factor of four. Thanks to oodles of regional small-scale hydroelectric power and admirable city and transit planning, Vancouver has the lowest per-capita carbon emissions of any North American city.

South of the border Seattle, has pledged carbon neutrality by 2030, but apparently Seattle did not get the invitation, nor did sustainability focused burgs such as New York, Amsterdam or Toronto attend. Also conspicuously absent were Asian city reps. The mayor of Rio de Janeiro did attend a panel with Branson and other mayors earlier in the week.

I couldn't find an explanation about how the Carbon War Room differs from or complements such efforts as the Clinton Climate Initiative's C40 group. The C40 approach is working on all inhabited continents with some of the world's largest cities, in a very similar vein: financing a $5 billion deal in 2007 on energy retrofitting older city buildings of New York, Chicago, Mexico City, Berlin, and Tokyo, for instance.

Most recently C40 cities announced in Copenhagen the creation of a C40 electric vehicle network as part of one of the few COP-15 "wins," the Climate Summit for Mayors. 

Anyone active in the green economy is already seeing many alliances taking shape, a few which have employed savvy marketing and visible leadership. Winning green city public-private partnerships, however, will also draw upon compelling business cases and urban performance analytics while clearly putting forth their value proposition.

Richard Branson versus Bill Clinton, now there's a match that could rival the Olympics. Could a more effective approach besides individual competition be a relay or other team event, perhaps?

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.   

This weekend I volunteered to warn shopkeepers and officials in my San Francisco suburb about dangerous urban flooding potential during the next week.

Every Friday noon in San Anselmo the "flood siren" (not disaster siren, mind) is tested. Within fifteen minutes of the last time it blasted for real in 2005, at 3:30 a.m. on a Saturday, three to four feet of water was soon gushing down the main street (see photo above) into homes and businesses. People here are acutely sensitive to heavy rain and the level of the town's creek, since they are still trying to rise up from that cold watery blow four years ago.

Up and down the California coast, metro areas including Los Angeles and San Francisco, are experiencing a series of El Nino-generated Pacific storms. Further inland, Phoenix will also take a big hit. The forecasted 6-10 inches of rain over the next days will almost certainly bring localized flooding and mudslides. Ocean storm swells will reach 20-30 feet on some parts of the coast by Thursday, lashing roads, infrastructure and housing. (Update Jan. 22: the storms this week luckily did not flood San Anselmo, but did cause heavy rains, some flooding and infrastructure damage throughout the state and Arizona, while also reducing the region's drought).

NOAA 5-day precipitation forecast from 1/16/10: small purple circles in California represent areas expected to receive 8+ inches.

How much of this weather and its impacts can be directly attributed to global climate change, I will not venture. The coastal and tidal flooding that is expected in California, however, will be one of the hallmarks of a changing climate. Another effect will be drought---which California and the Southwest have been experiencing for three years--the flip side of climate change's growing precipitation impacts. Coastal and desert urban areas in particular need to steel themselves for such a schizophrenic future.

Leaving things up to "officials" to figure out disaster plans is not recommended; true community resilience will require research, networking and knowledge sharing within and outside one's normal sphere. In my case, I think I was able to plug a few vital holes that may have been missed.

Most store owners in San Anselmo (pop. 12,000) that I spoke with were savvy about imminent flood danger. Based on their experience with the New Year's Eve flood of 2005, a few shopkeepers had excellent information and resources: they referred me to online creek-level readings ("anything over ten feet and I'm out of here," one man said), and email alerts that can be sent to email or phones from Nixle.com, a national information mass customization service that localizes updates on disasters, road closures and crime.

Nixle, for instance, has newly updated postings from the San Anselmo Police Department about potential hazards for flooding and safeguards. There's even a local AM radio (1610) station dedicated to disaster updates for the area.

But none of that seemed to be enough to really prepare people. One friend, a council member from the neighboring town that was also flooded in 2005, did not know about the severity of the forecast weather when I chanced to run into him at a musical performance over the weekend. He had me send him the forecast links from NOAA showing him exactly how much precip is expected to fall. He emailed back, "We're trying to get our flood plain residents to batten down the hatches. This should help."

Other small business owners that I spoke to were new to town, including immigrants. Unlike long-time business owners who told me they were warned by the police (or that had vivid mud-damaged inventory and moldy wallboard memories), the new shopkeepers knew almost nothing about flooding dangers or where to get the free sandbags.

Those who were around in December 30, 2005, have learned that floodgates (above, white board) for each business offers the best protection. In actuality, these are just rails installed on each side of entrance door where a piece of plywood can be inserted as a barrier against the torrents of water can come crashing against and under the front shop door (usually glass). Gates work even better than sandbags, but sandbags will prevent the glass doors from being smashed open.

The town and surrounding communities, even the federal government, tried to take some larger-scale policy actions after the 2005 flood, which caused almost $100 million in property damages county-wide. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) developed a new local flood risk map based on the 2005 event, and insurers offered policies that residents within the areas were urged to purchase. An extensive engineering study of the region's watershed is being made, a $125-per-property flood fee narrowly passed a controversial vote, while creek debris clean-ups have become popular all-age volunteer events each fall before the winter rainy season arrives.

Some houses have been rebuilt and raised above the flood-prone region along San Anselmo/Corte Madera Creek. This normally placid creek empties seven miles later into San Francisco Bay. High bay tides back the creek up so that it can't empty into the bay quickly.

San Anselmo/ Corte Madera Creek Watershed: San Anselmo is in center, San Francisco Bay, on right

Unfortunately, it doesn't take much time for San Anselmo/Corte Madera Creek (watershed in brown above) to back up from San Francisco Bay and rise in the Marin communities lining its flood plain, since it is surrounded by steep canyons that channel rainfall off nearby hills. Asphalt parking lots, impermeable pavement and poorly planned development have also increased the speed by which rainwater runs off into the creek. For instance, when I checked creek levels online Sunday the 17th, the creek was 2.9 feet, but after heavy rains Sunday night and Monday morning the creek was already over 6 feet. Flood stage is 11 feet (update 1/20/10: after heavy rain, the creek level went from 4 feet to 10 feet in matter of five hours, before receeding slightly) .

The irony of California's winter storms is that they bring needed water to reservoirs and mountain snowpack, promising to reduce or temporarily end the region's ongoing drought, which has been costing the agriculture industry and some cities hundreds of millions in lost revenue and in water purchases. Marin County last year was the first in the Bay Area to approve desalination from San Francisco Bay water, despite energy and marine environmental impacts along with a hefty $100 million-plus price tag.

Not surprisingly, the state's residents have a love-hate relationship with their winter weather. To make the affair even more volatile, climate change may be swinging the status from drought to flood in a matter of a few weeks.

Indeed, California's coastal metros (along with the Gulf Coast, including Florida and New Orleans) may be the first litmus test for how to adapt to the unpredictable excesses and scarcities of a changing climate.

 Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.

The top ten sustainability stories of the past decade was my last post. What trends are likely the next ten years? One thing for sure, 2010 through 2019 will be one day be looked at as 1.) the turning point for addressing climate change by using effective urban management strategies, or it will be remembered as 2.) the time when we collectively fumbled the Big Blue Ball.

 

 

 

1.      Bikes Culture 2.0

Time period: 2010-2019

 

Around the world, bicycles are becoming a potent talisman of our urban post-carbon future. The city of Copenhagen is making noise to replace the Little Mermaid of Hans Christian Andersen fame with something two-wheeled. Copenhagen residents use bikes for 37 percent of all their transit. But bikes in Europe represent more than utility; riding a bicycle with the Velib' bikeshare program in Paris now easily competes (42 million registered users) with taking a spring walk along the Seine. Bikesharing abounds in dozens of European cities as well as in Rio de Janeiro and Santiago, Chile. Look for North American burgs to continue their proliferation of bicycles-as-transit use and bike lane expansion (NYC bicycle use is up 61% in two years). Bikesharing on a large scale should follow new programs in Montreal, Washington DC, and Minneapolis. Note to China: time to reclaim your status as the world's "bicycle kingdom." 

Indoor bicycle parking will be common in commercial garages and offices even in businesses like cafes, bars (Gastalt Haus in Fairfax, California, is pictured above), stores and restaurants. On public transportation bicycles will be allowed access at any time. In short, bicycles and their riders will become legit, which will influence fashion, the economies and the design of cities in particular. As musician-turned-bike-rack designer David Byrne observed in his surprise 2009 bestseller Bicycle Diaries, US metro areas in particular might have to be re-engineered completely in some cases to accommodate this massive social transformation: 

I try to explore some of these towns--Dallas, Detroit, Phoenix, Atlanta--by bike and it's frustrating. The various parts of town are often "connected"--if one can call it that--mainly by freeways, massive awe-inspiring concrete ribbons that usually kill the neighborhoods they pass through, and often the ones they are supposed to connect as well.

 

2.      Mexico City, Climate Change, and the Future of Cities

Time Period: November-December 2010

 

Because "Nopenhagen" was a semi bust, the Mexico City United Nations Climate Change conference is taking on much bigger proportions than initially envisioned. The UN COP15 Copenhagen conference resulted in no binding treaty status among any of the 128 nations that attended for them to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. This year's late fall gathering in Mexico City is likely to set national binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions. If enacted, these targets will set the stage the coming entire decade's greenhouse gas reduction strategies, including sub-national efforts at the regional and city level. After disappointment in Copenhagen, UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon lost no time in preparing for Mexico City, calling on world leaders to sign a legally binding carbon-emission reduction treaty and to contribute to a multi-national fund for developing nations that will be opened this month. Let's hope such a fund adequately addresses sustainable urban development in Asian cities, whose currently unregulated hyper-growth is expected to contribute more than half the world's greenhouse gas increases between now and 2027.

 

3.      The Rise of Cellulosic Biofuels

Time Period 2014-2019

 

Creating conventional biofuels from corn, soybeans and palm oil as an alternative to petroleum-based gasoline hit numerous roadblocks in the past decade. Carbon-sequestering rainforests in Indonesia continue to be burned down for palm oil plantations; this unforeseen consequence of biofuel demand caused the European Union to back off on large orders of palm oil. Another big unintended consequence emerged when crude oil prices rose to record levels in 2007-2008. Biofuels, including corn-based ethanol created competition for agricultural land, resulting in an increase in the cost of food staples. Global corn prices, which biofuels caused to increase an estimated 15% to 27% in 2007 alone, were especially impacted.

 

Cellulosic biofuels, in contrast, offer the promise by the middle of the decade of creating a viable energy source (one of many that will be needed) from waste products, such as wood waste, grasses, corn stalks, and other non-food products. The trick will be to balance land use with energy production http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0602-ucsc_rogers_biofuels.html so that unintended consequences, particularly burning rainforests and urban food price riots (Mexico City in 2007 pictured above) will be a thing of the past. Backed by research funding from the Obama Administration's US Department of Energy (DOE), companies such as Mascoma Corporation and Amyris Biotechnologies (with former Amyris founder Jay Keasling now at the helm of the DOE Joint Biosciences Energy Institute) are some of the current leaders in the quest for a non-food biofuel.

 

4.      The marriage of ICT and Green Cities

Time Period: 2013-2019

Called "the great digital underbelly" of new and retrofitted sustainable cities by Gordon Feller of Urban Age, green ICT (information and communications technologies) holds promise for increasing the energy and resource efficiency of most aspects of urban development. If these technologies can offset their operating and production resource impacts (estimated to use 2-3 percent of total industry energy used, but forecast to double by 2022), the world could benefit from initial increased efficiencies in the 15-25 percent range (pdf). A crowded field that includes IBM, Cisco, General Electric, Siemens and others is positioning to implement new ICT for sustainability in cities, demonstrating applications at the pilot project level. Cities with pilot or operating projects in green ICT include Amsterdam, San Francisco, Masdar City (United Arab Emirates), Seoul, London, Singapore, Beijing, New Delhi, Mumbai, Stockholm and Oslo. The following are Green Smart City applications and examples of companies involved:

• traffic congestion monitoring and pricing systems: IBM, Capita Group
• water applications (leakage detection, purification): IBM, Siemens
• building applications (sense-and-respond technologies to monitor temperature, light, humidity and occupancy): Johnson Controls, Siemens, IBM
• intelligent public transportation and logistics: PwC, Samsung, Cisco
• public shared offices with telepresence (pictured above): Cisco, Hewlett-Packard
• home and office smart appliances that can tie in with smart grid energy applications: General Electric, AT&T, Whirlpool
• smart grids: General Electric, Schneider Electric, SAP, Oracle, ABB
• data centers for cities: Google, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco
• carbon inventories and carbon accounting: Microsoft, Oracle

     

 

5.      Implementation of Carbon Taxes

2010-2019

 

Exxon Mobil surprised many in early 2009 when it called for a carbon tax as a way to address global climate change. Whether the former denier of global climate change got religion remains to be seen. Carbon taxes have been proposed for oil, natural gas and coal by many as a way to adjust former so-called market "externalities," or impacts beyond classically defined air pollution, which now includes greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. A handful of nations have some form of carbon tax, mostly in Scandinavia. On the sub-national level, British Columbia and the San Francisco Bay Area recently proposed some form of the tax. Costs for carbon taxes can be passed on to consumers directly, or they could be levied on industry, which would likely cause manufacturing and operating costs to be wholly or partially passed onto consumers.

 

Currently, the costs of producing and using fossil fuels do not take into account the vast damage these activities do to the earth's climate, which is gaining atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at a rapid rate, endangering the stability of natural ecosystems, people's health, and the economy.

 

6.      The First Big Urban Climate Change Adaptation: Drought

2010-1019

 

A major effort at climate change adaptation is underway in California as well as other urban areas that are experiencing or are likely to feel the early effects from climate change. Prolonged droughts consistent with the impacts of climate change are being seen in Beijing, Southwestern North America (Mexico City/ LA, etc.) and urban areas in Southeast Australia.

 

As Maude Barlow (above) writes in her 2008 book Blue Covenant, cities are becoming hotspots not only for suffering from the effects of water shortages, but in many cases urbanization may be actually creating or exacerbating the severity of drought:

 

Massive urbanization causes the hydrologic cycle to not function correctly because rain needs to fall back on green stuff -- vegetation and grass -- so that the process can repeat itself. Or we are sending huge amounts of water from large watersheds to megacities and some of them are 10 to 20 million people, and if those cities are on the ocean, some of that water gets dumped into the ocean. It is not returned to the cycle.

 

Adaptation strategies will focus on preparing government, business and citizens for extreme heat events, wildfires (including urban/suburban wildfires), disease, and large-scale migration of populations from impacted areas. Some of the efforts will involve education and community outreach, such as Chicago's efforts to alert the elderly and handicapped to imminent heat waves, or having people check on others that may be vulnerable when conditions warrant. Other measures will require huge chunks of investments in urban  public and private infrastructure to prevent coastal flooding and to store dwindling seasonal water supplies, while health care professionals are likely to be first responders to new climate change-boosted disease outbreaks, such as dengue fever. The military is also likely to be added to the mix of climate change adaptation actors.

 

 

7.      End of Cheap Oil/ Onset of Fossil Fuel Shortages

2012-2019

 

Besides fresh water, oil is the most threatened increasingly imported resource in developed economies. Energy shortages or supply disruptions are expected to continue to develop because of political acts, terrorism, warfare and natural disasters. The issue is not that the reserves are "running out," but that getting at the remaining oil in a cost-effective manner is becoming increasingly more difficult, as has been outlined in multiple books by author Richard Heinberg (The Party's Over, Peak Everything) and others. As former Shell Oil CEO Jeroen van der Veer said in a 2008 email to employees, "Shell estimates that after 2015, supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand." Add the coming impacts of global climate change regulations to the scarce oil equation (see Trends numbers 2 and 5 in this post), and oil will continue to be an unpredictable flashpoint for the world economy. In 2007-2008, rapidly rising oil prices helped trigger a deep world recession; during the next decade oil may set off a chain of economic and civil events that could be far more severe.

 

With market uncertainty for oil prices and oil supplies, this new decade will witness the sunset of exurban-style automotive dependant sprawl in the United States and in many overseas copycat developments, particularly Asia. The overbuilt market for large, totally car-dependent single family homes in outer suburbia is expected by even some developers to not be viable for almost a decade, even if oil prices and supply stay relatively stable. A prolonged recurrence of oil prices above $100-150 a barrel will drive a stake through the heart of the exurban car-only model of real estate speculation, and will hit many other elements (food, imported goods, oil-based products) of the Western economy.

 

8.      Focus on Urban Agriculture and Foodsheds

Time Period: 2012-2019

As fuel prices rise and unexpected energy shortages occur, food prices will rise rapidly, especially for food that must be transported long distances via airplanes, stored and processed. The alternative is greater local and regional food production in and around cities. Existing cities in Latin America (Havana, Cuba--pictured above--and Quito, Ecuador), Africa (Dar Es Salam, Tanzania; Kampala, Uganda) and Asia (Seoul, South Korea), have produced significant quantities of produce or aquaculture within their city limits. Cities in North America that have maintained or are building or rebuilding strong regional food networks include Seattle, Honolulu, Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Some newly planned cities are being engineered to produce significant amounts of food that can also be used as a potential energy source or rich compost nutrient. Examples include Masdar City in Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates) and a supposedly scalable community plan called NewVista that is expected to be prototyped in the United States and in Asia: both are innovating the production of food from algae and other low-energy input nutrient sources.

 

9.      Resiliency planning: cities, towns, homes

Time Period: 2010-2019

 

Resiliency is about making a system or one's self stronger and more able to survive adversity. As the previous items portend, there will no shortage of adversity during the coming decade from climate change and energy supply instability. One of the major social phenomena related to resiliency has been the emergence of the Transition Town movement, which has grown from a few villages in the United Kingdom to Barcelona, Spain, Boulder, Colorado, and Sydney, Australia. The founder of the phenomena, Rob Hopkins, also a Post Carbon Institute Fellow, has used his transition model of Totnes, United Kingdom, to devise a global organizational playbook. The purpose of transition thinking is to prepare people for potential shortages in global energy supplies and food caused by peaking oil and climate change. In contrast to earlier "off-the-grid" movements of the 1970s, Transition Towns can be located in urban neighborhoods as well as in the distant boonies, and they focus on community-scaled solutions in transportation, health, economics and people's livelihoods and personal skills. Tactics of local groups vary widely, with events ranging from the familiar--clothing swaps and art festivals to the seemingly more obscure--"unleashings,"--to policy-laden activities, such as launching a long-term (15-20 years) "Energy Descent Action Plan." The emphasis is on understanding and using collective community resources, including knowledge and skills, that people have in their own sphere of influence, versus waiting for top-down government decrees.

 

10.  Sustainability Movie/ Novel /Art/ Song

       Time Period 2010-2019

 

 

There has yet to be a significant work of popular art that I am aware of that captures the modern systemic aspirations of sustainability. In terms of modern life, some works have focused on environmental destruction, (Marvin Gaye's song "Mercy Mercy Me"), the terror of abrupt climate change (the unsuccessful 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow), the international political subterfuge behind oil (2005's Syriana with George Clooney, one of my personal favorite films), and the destruction of natural systems (Dr. Seuss's 1971 book The Lorax) or cultural/species depletion (James Cameron's 2009 film Avatar), but no novel, song, painting or movie has come close to depicting a fictional world of what holistic sustainability solutions might look like, even feel like. Any suggestions of existing or planned works that would fit the bill?

Odds are that breakthrough art successfully depicting sustainability will feature or draw upon urban culture in some fashion. After all, cities have gone from being perceived as the opposite of what the "environmental movement" has been trying to save, to the epicenter of this new revolution that is launching in a city or neighborhood near you.

 

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.

 

 

It's the end of the decade 2000-2009, and there has been progress as well as potential disaster for sustainability. In chronological order, I've chosen these ten stories to show a range of relevant global and national issues and events on climate, business, government, media, design, technology, language and demographics. Some of the entries are pegged to an exact date, while others cover a time period.

The first entry, climate change is impacting all aspects of sustainability thought, planning and action.

1.       Terror of the Decade: Global Climate Change Confirmed by...Climate, IPCC, Heads of State

Time Period: 2000-2009

 

The evidence is overwhelmingly clear that we humans are changing the earth's climate in ways in which millions are beginning to regret. Ten of the hottest years on record globally have been recorded in the ten years since 1997. Some of the impacts: rising overall sea levels from melting polar ice are already damaging low-lying areas in Bangladesh, India, Egypt and China, and threatening the very existence of island nations. More intense hurricanes (Katrina killed more than 1,300 in 2006 and helped shut down the oil and gas refining sector in the Gulf Coast); droughts, heat (the Europe heat event of 2003 caused more than 35,000 deaths) and wildfires (Australia's Melbourne-area deadly firestorm of 2009 exploded during one of the hottest periods ever recorded Down under, dramatizing the ravishes of an ongoing 8-year drought).

So what if these are chance events, unrelated to man's impact on the globe's climate? That's a fair question and an outside possibility, but odds are that these extreme events were at least partially due to the rising global concentration of CO2, which is now at about 390 parts per million (ppm), up from 315 ppm in the late 1950s. The real threat is that things will get much worse (heat waves, droughts, floods, depletion of glaciers and water supplies, agriculture and fisheries disruption) if our global greenhouse gases continue to increase. Human-based greenhouse gas emissions increased 70% between 1970 and 2004, according to the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, also known as the IPCC). The watershed IPCC Fourth Assessment Report of 2007 developed by 2,500 of the world's leading climate scientists, put the likelihood at more than 90 percent that the global temperature increase of .74 Celsius between 1906 and 2005 has been caused by human greenhouse gas emissions. How often have 2,500 scientists agreed on anything? The landmark 2007 "Stern Review on the Economic of Climate Change," by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern, estimates that global climate change could negatively impact the world economy annually at 5-20 percent Gross Domestic Product, while Stern estimated that the annual costs of reducing the risks of global climate change are estimated to be about 1 percent of world GDP.

Unfortunately, the UN COP-15 conference in Copenhagen ended with a whimper, producing only a non-binding agreement to limit global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrialized temperature levels. Follow-up actions, including a potential binding treaty, will set the agenda for the next decade and beyond.  

2.       Word: Sustainability

Time Period: 2000-2009

 

The use of the term "sustainability" itself has been a major surprise this past decade. In 2000, only a few policy wonks and academics used the word, traditionally defined as "meeting present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs." Now the public (maybe even more than the media) is gleaning that "sustainability" differs considerably from "environmentalism" as it is based on planning for an uncertain future based on economics, culture, resources and technology.

As the current decade closes many are searching for a term that could replace "sustainability," claimed to be almost meaningless now because it has been hijacked by greenwashing corporate marketing campaigns (I bet some such ads pop up next to this post somewhere in future digital ether!). "Resilience" is currently gaining  traction, but we'll perhaps need another decade to see if the "s-word" gets dethroned.

3.       Standards: LEED Green Buildings

Date: March 2000

 

The US Green Building Council formally released its Leadership in Energy and Environment Design building standards (LEED) full Green Building Rating system 2.0 in March 2000. The impact on the nation's building and construction industry over the next ten years has been wildly popular and transformational on numerous levels. The number of LEED-certified or registered buildings increased from 10,000 in 2007 to 20,000 by the beginning of 2009. Providing a system-based measurable standard of what "green" means is useful for policy, benchmarking and new market development. The LEED ratings, for instance,  were integral to my ability to develop an overall sustainability benchmarking of US cities starting in 2005 (which can found in my book How Green is Your City?). Critics have assailed LEED for providing standards in certification that do not reflect actual performance in energy efficiency. Nevertheless, LEED standards, are now being positioned for international markets (in competition with Europe's BREE-AM and China's emerging Three Star standard), and they continue to be a powerful teaching tool, not to mention an industry onto themselves. Today's savvy urban planner, construction manager or architect must possess the LEED-AP, "Accredited Professional" tagline on their business card. In addition to new commercial building construction, LEED is now being applied to homes, existing buildings, schools, neighborhoods and may even extend to cities, under the LEED for Neighborhood Development standard that was launched in 2009.

The next challenges for green building standards will be rating life-cycle impacts (carbon, water, scarce resources) of construction processes and material, while integrating measures of building performance--how much buildings actually save energy or water once they are occupied.

4.       Product: The Toyota Prius

Date: July 2000

Back in the 1990s, Toyota Motor Corporation CEO Katsuaki Watanbe helped birth the "G-21," later known as the Prius, when he decided that middle-class consumers wanted a car that used new motor innovations to be fuel-efficient. The Prius hybrid gas-electric car was introduced in the United States in July 2000. It quickly became a Hollywood status symbol after Leonardo DiCaprio bought one in 2001, and he and other stars such as Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart (remember her?) began showing up at the 2003 Oscar ceremonies not in chauffeured limos, but behind the wheel or driven in their own Priuses. By the decade's peak sales year of 2007, the Toyota Prius had sold 180,000 units in the United States. These cars get 40-50 miles per gallon but perhaps even more importantly provide a meter showing real-time and historic fuel efficiency; self-monitoring feedback is one of the greatest ways of changing behavior to reduce energy use.

Plug-in electric models of the Prius will begin to be released on  test basis in 2010, in a challenge to the introduction of GM's Chevy Volt. Plug-ins may create fuel efficiencies that can truly reduce carbon emissions and oil dependency, getting from 51 to 100+ miles per gallon. One problem with electric cars or plug-in hybrid electrics is that their true sustainability impact depends on exactly how the electricity they use is produced at the power plant: renewables or dirty coal? In parts of the United States that continue to burn large amounts of coal to generate electricity (Southeast, lower Midwest and Plains states), driving an electric car does little or nothing to reduce a person's overall carbon footprint when compared to gas-burning cars. When you consider cars and health, social, land use and material life-cycle impacts, driving less is better for people's fitness, the environment and the planet.

5.       Corporate Story. Wal-Mart Embarks on a "Green" Path

Time Period: 2004-2005

 

I must admit, I was a skeptic when I first heard of Wal-Mart's plan to go green in 2004 from Jib Ellison, founder of Blue Skye Consulting, one of the major collaborative forces behind Wal-Mart's transformation. Wal-Mart, at that point the largest company in the world (it's now number 3), had been known for its ruthless management style, questionable labor practices, and for helping put locally owned stores in towns across the country out of business. Ellison had met with Wal-Mart's then-CEO Lee Scott at the behest of Conservation International's CEO Peter Seligman, and Scott decided upon a serious campaign to make the company more resource and energy efficient. Since that meeting, the company has been streamlining its transportation fleet, buildings and some products to be less environmentally destructive. The company is now targeting its supply chain, which is primarily in China, in a loosely defined, greening protocol.

The impact of Wal-Mart going green helped awaken the nation's business leaders to the potential of making their own operations and supply chains energy and resource efficient, (just sounds like good business to me). Wal-Mart announced earlier in 2009 that it would require manufacturers to calculate and disclose the full environmental costs of ingredients and processes on product labels sometime in the next five years. Suppliers, formerly isolated or little regulated, are now assessing their operations in a way they never would have without the threat of greater scrutiny from their biggest customer.

6.       Regulations: California's Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32)

Time Period: 2005-2006

 

When California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made the declaration in June 2005 that, "I say the debate is over (on climate change),"  many were still heatedly arguing that climate change needed more studies before action was taken. The Governor and the California Legislature pressed ahead in 2006 to sign the nation's first major climate change mitigation legislation, known as AB 32 . Now AB 32 will soon be implemented across industries and even in local communities through follow-up legislation such as the regulation known as SB 375, the nation's first statewide regulatory attempt to limit suburban and exurban sprawl. Meanwhile, opponents of AB 32, are gearing up for 2010 gubernatorial elections, claiming AB 32 will cost the state $143 billion in auction taxes alone. Whatever happens next, California is being looked on by the Obama Administration and world leaders as the pace setter in climate change mitigation with its aggressive automotive fuel standards, green building standards and AB 32's goal of reducing greenhouse gases 80% over 1990 levels by 2050.

7.       Film: An Inconvenient Truth

Date: May, 2006

Released in Summer 2006 at the Sundance Film Festival, An Inconvenient Truth made the debate on climate change public. The documentary, which was actually just a series of lectures and slideshows that former Vice President Al Gore was giving around the world, hit a nerve. Despite "action scenes" that consisted of Gore either 1.) riding up elevators or 2.) riding down escalators, the film created a major public buzz and introduced the subject of climate change to popular culture. An Inconvenient Truth received an Academy Award in 2007 for Best Documentary and went on to set records for box office revenues in its category. An Inconvenient Truth offered very few solutions, suggesting compact fluorescent bulbs and little more. This critical learning opportunity was finally addressed when Gore released a follow-up book in 2009, A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.

8.       Book: The Omnivore's Dilemma

Date: May, 2006

 

Michael Pollan's 2006 book The Omnivore's Dilemma made clear the benefits of sustainable agriculture and food production, and even foraging or killing your own food: it's healthier for people, animals, farmers, the land and nature. The ongoing popularity of this book has helped create a demand for sustainably raised food that has out-paced supply. The Omnivore's Dilemma patiently outlined what is wrong with industrial agriculture and livestock production, where highly subsidized ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup have become a surplus commodity to be forced upon products or animals in order to reduce the price of ingredients, without regard to health (diabetes, reduced nutrition). I had the good fortune of meeting Angelo Garro, the Italian forager, now based in Northern California who was profiled in the last half of the book. As we traded notes on wild huckleberry picking one afternoon at a friend's orchard party, he was pulling off some strips of meat from a boiled carcass. When the sun went down most were unknowingly eating a jack rabbit that Angelo had shot in the orchard a few hours before--it had made its way into a delicious bolognese pasta sauce.

9.       Design: Masdar City, First Planned Net-Zero Carbon City

Time Period: 2006-2017

 

Masdar will be a 50,000-person city based on applied sustainability research and technology that is being developed in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. While other cities have been planned to be net-zero carbon (Dongtan, China, which is not being developed because of local corruption and other issues), Masdar has been one of the few net-zeros that appear to be proceeding as planned. With financial partners Credit Suisse, Siemens and General Electric, Masdar is also backed by the city-state of Abu Dhabi, as well as technology partners from the UK and Spain. The complex is being used for cutting-edge research in: renewable energy (including dozens of active and passive solar and wind technologies), water conservation technologies that can distill drinking water from ambient moisture both indoors (sweat) and outdoors (dew), as well as local urban food production schemes. In fall 2009, the Masdar Institute of Technology opened, in conjunction with MIT, where students get degrees in engineering,  material sciences, IT, water and the environment, all with a relationship to the real world demonstration projects taking root in the city that in Arabic means "the source."

10.   Future Trend: Mega-growth of Unregulated Asian Cities + Mega Drought

Time Period: 2009-2030

Between now and 2027 Asian Cities will account for more than half of the world's greenhouse gas increases, according to a study by the Asian Development Bank. From Mumbai to Beijing, cities will add a projected 1.8 billion people over the next two decades; they are almost entirely unregulated in their growth, carbon management and environmental impacts, despite some new siloed attempts to manage their industries, power production and energy efficiency. The daunting challenge is that no regulatory structure exists to monitor this collection of Asian mega-cities, despite the fact that many of these cities has or will have populations of 10-20 million individuals. This megagrowth began around the beginning of the 00's, when Asian urban population was at 1.4 billion. Asia is projected to have about 3 billion urbanites by 2030.

Water is the first epic Asian city resource crisis. The Tibetan Plateau, source of most of the region's major sources of fresh water (including the Yangtze, Yellow, Mekong, Ganges, Irrawaddy and the Indus rivers) has been experiencing a seven percent loss of glaciers on an annual basis, according to a report released last week (pdf) at the Copenhagen climate conference. 

Beijing has been hit especially hard by a ten-year drought (pdf): the city of 17 million has enough water for only 14 million. Beijing has been forced to procure water from surrounding agricultural regions and rapidly diminishing groundwater, while some cities in India have completely run out of water during periods of drought over the past decade.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute. 

 

Tuvalu and its surrounding waters

The Copenhagen climate summit ended today, with a non-binding agreement signed by industrialized countries to limit global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the temperature when industrialization began.

The island nation of Tuvalu led a revolt last week by developing nations against the 2-degree idea, asserting it wanted increases to be capped at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrialization levels.

Apisai Ielemia, the Prime Minister of the 10,000-person island chain in the south Pacific, said his people will have "no other inland to run to," when average ocean waters are expected to rise because of melting polar ice.

 
Developing nations also protested a pre-conference paper that was discovered to be circulating among developed nations, with suggested stipulations that have proven to be similar to today's end agreement.

China and the US, meanwhile, went head to head over what could be quantifiable and verifiable in China. There was even talk early this week of border tariffs that may be imposed by the United States on Chinese imported goods if they do not transparently demonstrate their greenhouse gas reductions.

The agreement called for the US to cut CO2 emissions between 14-17 percent by 2020 from 2025 levels. Presdient Obama called the deal "meaningful and unprecedented."

Developed countries including the United States will provide $100 billion a year by 2020 to help "most vulnerable" poor nations (Tuvalu?) cut their carbon emissions in a deal that was announced by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday. They will also pay out $30 billion to developing countries from next year through 2012.

The agreement occurred after US President Barack Obama had at-the-deadline talks with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and South African President, Jacob Zuma

No agreements have been made for emission reductions by 2050, and follow-up talks will be necessary to put binding measures into effect. A scheduled meeting in Mexico City in December 2010 may be moved up to this summer if negotiating countries decide they want to act sooner rather than later in establishing a binding treaty for global greenhouse gas reduction. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, today's uninspired Copenhagen conclusion also has made it less likely that the Senate will pass greenhouse gas cap and trade regulations during its next session.

That doubt makes the US Environmental Protection Agency's announcement earlier this month that it will begin to regulate greenhouse gases even more critical in terms of how the US will actually achieve its pledged 14-17% greenhouse gas cuts by 2020.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.

"Cool Globe" by Terri Spath

A San Francisco non-profit, The Carbon Collaborative, has been running a ten-day series of informative events, briefings and panels called Cafe Copenhagen in conjunction with the UN COP-15 climate negotiations.

"Glocalization" efforts such as Cafe Copenhagen plug into and also amplify international issues impacting the global climate, environment and economy. These type of approaches help local leaders to contextualize their own initiatives; by doing so they are also more likely to influence and benefit from national and international policy outcomes.

The San Francisco Carbon Collective is a partnership of government, business, and environmental organizations tying to accelerate development of effective policy and market-based responses to climate change.

For the Copenhagen Cafe series of events, the organization put together everything from panel discussions, "Ask the Expert" briefings, lunchtime coffee discussions and participant surveys on expected COP 15 results and impacts.

"A lot of this about capacity building: so much is changing so fast, and it's such a broad area. People working on these issues can never get enough," said David Pascal, president of the San Francisco Carbon Collaborative. "And then there are people new to these issues. Some have even been holiday shopping and just wanted to stop in and see what we were doing."

Copenhagen Cafe is being held in the Crocker Galleria's Green Zebra Center in San Francisco's Financial District. Tonight's program (Dec. 10) at 6-8 p.m., for instance, will center on Sustainable Food Systems in conjunction with a farmers market, while a panel discussion on Monday night Dec. 14, 6-8 p.m., that I am on is focused on Sustainable Cities. Clean technology is topic of a panel on Tuesday, December 15.

Other themed events of the Copenhagen Cafe series focus on forestry, indigenous rights and oceans.

Copenhagen Cafe also features more casual "Coffee Talks" on topics such as "Negotiating Justice" (today, December 10, at 11:30 a.m.) and "What Can I Do? How to Work Your Changespheres" (Friday, Dec. 11 at 11:30 a.m.).

Guests on the Monday, December 14 Sustainable Cities panel that I am moderating will include Jean Rogers, lead sustainability consultant for Arup Engineering, Gordon Feller, CEO of Urban Age and executive editor of Urban Age Magazine, and UC Berkeley transportation researcher Laura Schewel, formerly of the Rocky Mountain Institute.  

According to Pascal, the almost-year old organization is fostering multi-stakeholder collaboration; building sector capacity; and supporting the development public policies, while catalyzing development and deployment of environmentally friendly technologies.

The collaborative has a permanent downtown office space, separate from the Copenhagen Cafe, in which shared tenants can informally work together, including DNV (Det Norske Veritas), the world's largest Clean Development Mechanism verifier, The International Emissions Trading Association and CSRware a cloud-computing carbon footprinting software firm. These companies and the collaborative are able to bring shared expertise and opportunities to the table for clean tech and related business planning, financing and operational strategies.

An early area of focus for the collaborative in capacity building and strategy development is carbon emissions trading, according to Pascal. California is set to begin trading in 2012, with the United States and other new markets outside Europe expected to launch markets by a later date, depending on the outcomes in Copenhagen and in Congress.

"Instead of waiting for these markets to unfold and be revealed, we are going to be trying to influence their early outcomes through our networks and events," Pascal said.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute. 



  

A sustainability ranking of 30 major European cities was released today in Copenhagen, the Scandinavian city that besides hosting the UN COP15 climate talks, has been chosen as top scorer in the new European Green City Index.

The study, sponsored by Siemens AG and developed by The Economist Intelligence Unit, ranked 30 major cities across Europe relative to one another in eight categories with 30 underlying qualitative and quantitative indicators.

The top cities, in ranked order:

1. Copenhagen, Denmark
2. Stockholm, Sweden
3. Oslo, Norway
4. Vienna, Austria
5. Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Don't think that this ranking is of the "Greenest Cities" in Europe, even though it's called The Europe Green City Index. Such an assumption is made by many about city sustainability indices. The cities at the bottom of this list are the poorest overall performers out of the study universe of 30. (Many thought the sustainability ranking for 50 US cities that I created in 2004 was a list of "America's greenest cities," even though we called it the SustainLane US City Rankings; the study is also featured in the 2007 book, How Green is Your City?)

The lowest-ranking cities in the European study, out of the total of 30 cities:

26. Zagreb, Croatia
27. Belgrade, Serbia
28. Bucharest, Romania
29. Sophia, Bulgaria
30. Kiev, Ukraine

Kiev, Ukraine

Interestingly, all the laggard cities are located in either the former Soviet Union, or in former Soviet-controlled Eastern European nations. The difference between the overall highest ranking city, Copenhagen, at 87, and the lowest-scoring city, Kiev at 33 is substantial.

The new European city ranking analyzed cities by the following eight categories:

• CO2
• Buildings
• Energy
• Transport
• Water
• Waste and Land Use
• Air Quality
• Environmental Governance

These categories leave out food, the only large oversight. Food accounts for a significant amount of greenhouse gas and other environmental impacts in its production, processing, transportation, storage, retailing and disposal. Siemens does not have a direct interest in the food business, so such an omission is not surprising.

When I added "food" as an indicator category for the 15 SustainLane US City Rankings categories--as measured in community gardens and farmer markets per capita--many, even in the "environmental community," were baffled. It's amazing to think that just five years ago there was so little connection seen between food to sustainability, especially in urban areas.

Fortunately, times have changed and the emphasis on local food and on sustainable agriculture and food production has been significant, especially in certain US urban areas (New York, Boston, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle).  

Back to the Europe Green City Index, Copenhagen ranked high in energy use--number 2--as measured in percentage of renewable energy, and also in environmental governance, in which it tied for first with Helsinki, Stockholm and Brussels, all scoring a perfect 10 points.

Copenhagen also ranked third in transportation; it has the highest rate of commute cycling of any major European city, with 36 percent of all trips taken by bicycle. Portland, the leading US city for cycling, by comparison, has an overall bike rate of 6 percent.

 
City cycling in Copenhagen

There is an obvious correlation in overall scores between the more wealthy--and higher-scoring--northern European cities and their poorer Eastern European counterparts, but the study did not include criteria for any direct economic or social factors. Housing affordability was one ranking criteria I added to the SustainLane US City Rankings after teachers that couldn't afford living in pricey San Francisco asked, "How sustainable is that?"

Some of the specific underlying indicators for the European Green City Index, included quantitative data points such as recycling rate, and use of public transportation along with other qualitative indicators (e.g. CO₂ reduction targets, efficiency standards for buildings).

Besides these tidbits of indicator information and the chart provided at the beginning of this post showing overall scores, the study has not yet provided adequate methodological factors such as weighting of indicator categories and a better explanation of exact scoring within the eight individual indicators for qualitative categories.

The index would also benefit by breaking out categories of analysis that are artificially grouped in a single category, such as "Water and Land Use." Water itself can and should be broken into separate categories such as "Water Supply" and "Water Quality." Land Use is also significant enough to merit a separate category of analysis, since planning and zoning can create large-scale urban sustainability impacts for many decades. 

Still, the results of the Europe Green City Index should be very useful, and will hopefully have the impact on European cities that other city sustainability rankings have achieved elsewhere with citizens, business, media and politicians: making urban sustainability performance more transparent, understandable within a class of peers, and subject to competition in "a race to the top."

Some of our biggest challenges in cutting carbon to reduce global climate change will be in understanding the system dynamics that cities and other complex entities such as corporations, neighborhoods or even our households comprise. We no longer have the luxury of viewing our energy sources, food, water, buildings and land as separate, unrelated systems, even if business, government and academic institutions have been formulated according to these silos.

Nor can we view our cities as separate systems from nature, the global climate and our social fabric.

Keeping score matters, or else we wouldn't know the score.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.