Have you heard about the A list? It’s harder to clinch a spot on it than it is to score an invite to the Met Gala. And your city may be on it.
An environmental impact nonprofit called the CDP (formerly known as the carbon disclosure project) just released a list of cities that led the world in environmental performance last year. Only 43 metropolises got As in the organization’s first-ever assessment, and nearly half of them are in the United States!
Twenty-one cities in the United States made the list. And a whopping nine cities in the San Francisco Bay area got As, too — making up 21 percent of all the cities on the list. Cities all across the map — like Cape Town, Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, and Paris — qualified as A-listers, as well.
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So what kind of policies get you on the A list? Five of the U.S. cities are on the path to carbon neutrality by 2050 — a target that is emerging as the gold standard of decarbonization: Boston; Indianapolis; Seattle; Washington, D.C.; and West Palm Beach, Florida. Those cities may be leading the charge, but they are not alone: the Sierra Club’s Ready For 100 campaign has calculated that more than 90 U.S. cities have set or are in the process of setting 100 percent renewable energy targets.
The CDP determined the way each city scored by looking at things like climate risk and vulnerability, whether the city in question had a climate change adaptation strategy, how many emissions that city produces, and more. Of the 596 cities the nonprofit ranked, it only publicly disclosed the cities that got an A.
