Best Cities to Learn From
Paris. Copenhagen. Sydney: the three cities named by a distinguished panel I moderated, at the Environmental Grantmakers Association's annual meeting, during which panelists were asked which city they had learned the most from about how to deal with climate change.
Copenhagen was Seattle Chief Resilience Officer Jessica Finn Coven's entry. Paris came from Chris Wheat, sustainability director for Chicago. Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson was going to name Paris, too, but since the City of Light was taken, he went with Sydney.
We asked a similar question in the survey on our website and got these additional cities: New York, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Seattle, Singapore, Vancouver. From our own "life after carbon" studies in the past year or so we'd add: Austin, Boston, Melbourne, Oslo, Rotterdam, Shanghai, and Stockholm. [Take the 7-question survey here.]
There's huge learning value in going somewhere and seeing urban climate innovations for yourself. Recently, a group of city and water utility folks from Stockholm traveled to Hamburg to look at how that city was designing a source separation system for wastewater--a way to increase energy and nutrient "mining" of wastewater and to reduce GHG emissions. The Stockholmers had been studying the potential of such an innovation, but everyone had lots of questions and concerns. "As soon as you move away from the conventional wastewater system, everyone gets nervous," says Elisabeth Kvarnstrom, co-director of the Stockholm effort. But seeing Hamburg's piloting efforts "was a game changer," she told a webinar audience of the Urban Sustainability Directors Network in October. "That tipped the participants. They got to see the systems for separate collection, that it’s not science fiction, that it can be done efficiently."
