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How do U.K. cities stack up in terms of sustainability?

Peter Madden, chief executive of Forum for the Future, writes a monthly column for Gristmill on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe.

Every year more and more people live in cities. Globally, we became a majority urban world for the first time last year, while here in the U.K., nine out of 10 of us live in towns and cities.

Cities are clearly important for sustainability. Although the romantic green notion of us all living on small holdings with a goat, a vineyard, and a vegetable patch is seductive, the future is much more likely to be dominated by megacities such as Mumbai, Shanghai, and Sao Paulo. We will have to learn to make such cities liveable and sustainable.

Concentrating people in urban centers does make it easier to provide some social and environmental services. But the big cities also have a huge environmental footprint. London, for example, has an ecological footprint 293 times its geographical area.

Cities are also important as centres of dynamism. They are where social, cultural, and economic innovation and change happens. Yet despite the undoubted importance of cities, most of the environment movement in the U.K. is still predominantly rural- and wildlife-oriented. They defend and protect stuff most ordinary people will never see. The greens haven't been very good at doing green cities.

Our big cities, on the other hand, haven't done a very good job of being sustainable either. Lots of our leading cities are making green claims. Manchester is determined to become "the Greenest City in Britain by 2010," Leicester calls itself "the environment city," Bristol wants to become a "Green Capital," and London is aiming for nothing less than the status of "most sustainable city in the world." But behind such claims there is very little objective measurement of what it means to be sustainable. We certainly don't have anywhere that really stands out as an example of overall good practice.

So, we at Forum for the Future decided to get stuck into the debate on sustainable urbanism. We researched and published a table ranking our 20 biggest cities.

Cyclists should be more involved as biking advocates

This essay is part of a series on bicycle neglect.

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Blame me. It's my fault the Northwest does not treat bicycling with respect. How? Bear with me, and I'll explain.

Cascadia is, as Washington state legislator Dick Nelson used to say, a "motorhead democracy" -- a place where licensed drivers substantially outnumber registered voters and where car-head dominates transportation thought and debate.

No matter how much good Bicycle Respect would do for our health, communities, economy, and natural heritage, it won't fly in on fairy wings. Bicycle Respect is a political agenda: new traffic laws and enforcement, new budget allocations, and new street designs.

So winning Bicycle Respect requires political power. When many elected leaders begin to see championing the bicycle as a path to higher office, as Portland City Commissioner Sam Adams does, we will be well on our way. When elected officials fear for their seats if they ignore the needs of the bicycle, we will have arrived.

Is there really so much money in environmental devastation that it can’t be stopped?

In the Nov. 12 New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert published an article (unavailable online; abstract here) typical of her style: spare, restrained, vivid, cogent, devastating. The topic was Canada’s tar sands, now being profitably exploited by the major oil companies: Shell, Conoco-Phillips, Chevron, and ExxonMobil. And they’ve only just begun. According to Kolbert, the oil majors […]

Mexico boosts funding for butterfly protection

Millions of butterflies clapped their tiny wings as Mexican President Felipe Calderon yesterday announced a plan to curb logging and protect habitat for migrating monarchs. Mexico has already boosted anti-logging efforts, resulting in a 48 percent drop in illegal tree-chopping in the last year. Calderon hopes the additional funding to be put toward the existing […]

Developing nations will not remain immune to the need for sustainable development

I want to thank Jeremy Carl of Stanford’s Program on Energy and Sustainable Development for dropping by and making the case for coal — or rather, the case for holding our nose, accepting that coal’s growth is inevitable, and working to make it cleaner (Jeremy’s posts are here and here). I hope the conversation will […]

What’s the ecological footprint of the gambling industry?

I won't explain how it came to pass that -- only two days after a trip to NYC to present Greenhouse Development Rights at a meeting of the UN's Committee for Development Policy -- I went to Las Vegas.

I will say that that my wife, an Aussie, wanted to see the place, that we have a 11-year-old boy, and that the Hilton contains an installation honoring the United Federation of Planets. (The flag of which has a notable similarity to the one displayed in the UN's own, rather more dilapidated, halls.)

Some quick thoughts:

Europe may ban two types of genetically modified corn

Europe may end up sans two types of genetically modified corn, as E.U. environment officials have proposed a ban on the seeds. Officials say the GM corn, made by powerful biotech companies DuPont Pioneer, Dow Agrosciences, and Syngenta, could harm wildlife and disrupt food chains. E.U. Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said the genetically modified corn […]

The NYT gets its hands dirty

In Italy and France, people don’t love small farms just for the delicious food they produce. They also prize them for their looks — small-scale diversified agriculture is pleasing to the senses. So city dwellers often head out to the country on the weekend and hang out on farms, and support them with their tourist […]

A study on gender equality as a prerequisite for sustainable development — debunked!

Lord knows we men are to blame for most things -- but global warming?

Yes -- according to a major new report (PDF) by Gerd Johnsson-Latham for the Environment Advisory Council of the Environment Ministry of ... wait for it ... Sweden. The report's focus:

What we know about the extent to which women globally live in a more sustainable way than men, leave a smaller ecological footprint and cause less climate change.

Ouch! Don't look at me -- I telecommute; my wife takes the car.

If gender equality is in fact a prerequisite for sustainable development, it's definitely be time to buy property on high ground. Fortunately, the theory is debunked by a best-selling nonfiction book: Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.

This is fatal to Gerd's theory. After all, which of those two planets is cold -- and which is "a 900-degree inferno" with a "runaway greenhouse effect," to quote a 2002 NASA study?

The defense rests.

Australia elects prime minister who wants to ratify Kyoto Protocol

The Kyoto Protocol climate treaty may soon welcome a new industrialized country to the fold. Australia’s newly elected prime minister, Kevin Rudd, has announced he will act in the next few weeks on a campaign promise to have Australia ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which would make the United States the only industrialized country in the […]