CNCA members selected the seven Game Changers to share with other cities: next-generation practices that can accelerate and amplify decarbonization in cities.

Cities that are embracing these game changing opportunities are thriving and benefiting economically because they are clean, efficient cities where people want to live. Gregor Robertson, Mayor, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

The Game Changers and the CNCA cities used as a main examples are:

• Adopt a Zero-Emissions Standard for New Buildings – Vancouver
• Build a Ubiquitous Electric-Vehicle Charging Infrastructure – Oslo
• Mandate the Recovery of Organic Material – San Francisco
• Electrify Buildings’ Heating and Cooling Systems – Boulder, New York City, Washington DC
• Designate Car-Free and Low-Emissions Vehicle Zones – Stockholm, London, Oslo
• Empower Local Producers and Buyers of Renewable Electricity – Washington DC, Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro
• Set a City Climate Budget to Drive Decarbonization – Oslo

The report details the cities’ key implementation steps and lessons learned and challenges that other cities may face in implementing the actions. It was released September 12 at the Global Climate Action Summit.

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Once upon a time, there were no filling stations and no gas-powered vehicles. That was in the late 1800s–a situation much like that for electric vehicles just a few years ago. Now there are 100s of thousands of gas stations, more than 100,000 of them in the US alone.

The honor of hosting the first filling station–if it’s an honor–belongs to Wiesloch, Germany, where in 1888 Bertha Benz refilled the car her engineer husband, Karl, had built. She bought ligroin, a petroleum-based solvent, from a local pharmacy to use as fuel. Later, pharmacies started to sell gas as a side business.

In the US, before there were any filling stations, drivers got fuel from general stores, hardware stories, and blacksmith shops, using cans, buckets, and drums and funnels. The first drive-in filling station opened in Pittsburgh in 1913, selling a gallon of gas for 27 cents. Around this time, pumps and meters were developed for the growing market. Oil companies started to open filling stations and branded chains/franchises appeared.

In other words, what began as improvisation and resourcefulness–filling however one might–became an entrepreneurial activity–a business model–and then a branded corporate product line. Along the way, government regulations for safety, pricing, and environmental protection came into play.

The emergence pf EV charging infrastructure has some similarities and some differences to the advent of gas stations. (Photo above: Charging station with NEMA connector for electric AMC Gremlin used by Seattle City Light in 1973.) Cities that are deeply committed to decarbonizing their transportation systems have been investing directly in installing public charging stations. By 2020, for instance, Oslo will have more than 3,000 chargers available to the public. At the same time, EV owners are charging their vehicles at home–a filling option that wasn’t available at the start of the gasoline age. And the expansion of EV charging will have implications for the electricity grid.

Some 100-year-old gas stations have become museums and someday all gas stations will have been retired. EV charging will be as normal and pervasive as gas stations are today.

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The first thing to notice in the report is the economic sectors that are growing: green buildings and clean tech. The green building sector has developed deep expertise in building envelope performance, while the city and the province of British Columbia have adopted some of the toughest green building standards in the world. The clean tech sector covers clean-energy production, management and storage; water treatment and management; material efficiency and circular economy; advanced materials development; green agritech; and clean transportation. Province-wide, clean tech companies raised $6 billion in equity investment between 2011 and 2017.

The report notes that “green job growth includes both new and transitional jobs. New jobs come from market expansion and growth, while transitional jobs are existing jobs in traditional sectors that have become green due to changed norms and practices (e.g. construction changes due to greener building codes). On average, 40 percent of growth in green jobs each year may be attributed to new jobs, while 60 percent of growth is due to transitional jobs.”

It also points to some of the fundamentals for urban success in the emerging economy:

• Branding–“Vancouver has a global reputation as a leading clean and green economy”
• Talent — Large numbers of highly educated people who become green-business entrepreneurs and employees and want to live in a sustainable city.

The report has much more information that other cities may find useful for developing strategies and indicators of their standing and progress in the economy that is coming.

The post Going Carbon Free: Vancouver Builds a Green Economy appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

It is designed by our Meister Consultants Group colleagues to help cities plan for a transition towards 100% renewable electricity supply. Cities and their partners will be able to use “Pathways to 100” to

1. understand their unique energy landscape,
2. identify strategies that are applicable to their utility and state policy context, and
3. organize city staff and external networks to support energy supply transformation.

“Pathways to 100” includes an Appendix that can help cities embed equity in their city energy supply system transformation. This work was made possible through the generous support of the Energy Foundation and The Kresge Foundation.

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That’s what renowned architect and product designer William McDonough told climate-action leaders from 17 global cities, during a late 2016 international exchange sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies and designed by INC and Meister Consulting Group. At about the same time McDonough published his thoughts online in “A New Language for Carbon,” a short essay that sought to straighten things out.

“The world’s current carbon strategy aims to promote a goal of zero,” McDonough noted. “Predominant language currently includes words such as ‘low carbon,’ ‘zero carbon,’ ‘negative carbon,’ and even a ‘war on carbon.’ The design world needs values-based language that reflects a safe, healthy and just world. In this new paradigm, by building urban food systems and cultivating closed-loop flows of carbon nutrients, carbon can be recognized as an asset rather than a toxin, and the life-giving carbon cycle can become a model for human designs.”

McDonough’s alternative language identifies three types of carbon:

• Living carbon: organic, flowing in biological cycles, providing fresh food, healthy forests and fertile soil; something we want to cultivate and grow
• Durable carbon: locked in stable solids such as coal and limestone or recyclable polymers that are used and reused; ranges from reusable fibers like paper and cloth, to building and infrastructure elements that can last for generations and then be reused
• Fugitive carbon: has ended up somewhere unwanted and can be toxic; includes carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, ‘waste to energy’ plants, methane leaks, deforestation, much industrial agriculture and urban development

And he offers three carbon-management strategies:

• Carbon positive: actions converting atmospheric carbon to forms that enhance soil nutrition or to durable forms such as polymers and solid aggregates; also recycling of carbon into nutrients from organic materials, food waste, compostable polymers and sewers
• Carbon neutral: actions that transform or maintain carbon in durable Earth-bound forms and cycles across generations; or renewable energy such as solar, wind and hydropower that do not release carbon
• Carbon negative: actions that pollute the land, water and atmosphere with various forms of carbon, for example, CO2 and methane into the atmosphere or plastics in the ocean.

The point, McDonough concludes, is to “work toward a Carbon Positive design framework.” In this proposed language, cities’ carbon-reduction approaches can be understood as using all three strategies. They seek to reduce Carbon Negative actions, while increasing Carbon Neutral and Carbon Positive actions.

What McDonough’s framework seems to suggest is that a city’s goal should be to become Carbon Positive and Carbon Neutral, and over time the balance of its actions would shift away from reducing Carbon Negative actions and toward promoting Carbon Positive and Negative actions. The Carbon Positive city is what might be called a Carbon Circular City — intentionally moving carbon from toxic forms (in the atmosphere) into harmless and usable forms.

In this language, “carbon neutrality,” a goal many cities aspire to, is not enough.

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Oh yea, I forgot. I also helped Pete and John launch the Innovation Network for Communities and Urban Sustainability Associates a decade ago, which later gave rise to the Urban Sustainability Directors Network, Nupolis and eventually their latest project, Life After Carbon (I’ve registered my complaint about their title; carbon is, after all, essential to all living things. . . Enough said). Full circle.

When I turned 50, almost three years ago, I decided that, if and when the opportunity arose, and with sustainability now more or less mainstream, at least as an idea, I would try my hand at the for-profit world, take what I have learned and taught and apply it as a sustainable real estate developer, believing this is no oxymoron but instead, given the state of things, a mandate, a call to action. Words into deeds, this time with an equity stake.

My friend and colleague David Zucker, a Denver-based developer whom I had met in 2009 at a conference I co-hosted at CU Boulder on urban development and climate change, gave me my opportunity when he invited me in early 2016 to help him take on an ambitious development project in Boulder, a 15-acre site that lay vacant for decades along East Arapahoe, a major commuter corridor chock full of employers and a morass of light-industrial uses but lacking workforce housing or thoughtful urban design, hardly a problem unique to Boulder.

At East Arapahoe we propose to build 340 units of housing, 40 percent of which will be below-market rate, plus 16,000 square feet of affordable commercial space targeted at small businesses and non-profits who, like so many Boulder residents, are being priced out of the market. Of course, the project aims to be green and climate-friendly, with bike racks and PV panels aplenty. In Boulder, this almost goes without saying.

Some experience under my belt, and only a few battle scars, last spring I helped organize a large team to compete for another Boulder project, the redevelopment of the 5.5-acre, city-owned Pollard Jeep site at 30th and Pearl in the heart of Boulder Junction, the city’s nascent transit village, across the street from Google’s brand-new Boulder headquarters. In August, our team was notified that we won the project, beating out three other teams from around the country.

Like the East Arapahoe project, the Pollard project will be green, transit-oriented, mixed-income and mixed-use, with more than half of the 304 housing units priced below-market and 20,000 square feet of permanently affordable commercial space. We also hope to make the project fossil-fuel free — all-electric with near net-zero building design. From Pollard’s SUVs to Boulder’s showcase TOD. It’s almost poetic.

With two large projects underway, my experiment in for-profit real estate development has begun in earnest. I plan to use this blog as a chronicle of my and others’ experiences, a place to reflect, reveal and occasionally rant regarding what I see as both the challenges and opportunities, risks and rewards, of joining a social entrepreneur’s mission, values and ideas with the hardscrabble reality of getting good projects built in places like Boulder.

More Shutkin: Affordability is the New Sustainability and All Things Are Connected

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The Zone is composed of two stretches of mostly coastal land in the United States, covering 12 states. Atlantic Climate Zone spans 400 miles, from Washington D.C., Baltimore, and Philadelphia to New York City and Boston, and contains more than 33.7 million people in its major metropolitan areas. Pacific Climate Zone sweeps across 1,100 miles, from Los Angeles and San Francisco to Portland and Seattle, with about 24 million people in the largest metro regions. These Zone’s combined metropolitan areas alone generate about 23 percent of the entire U.S. economy’s annual output—a combined GDP larger than any nation except China and Japan.

When you use a climate economy lens to look at this population and economic data, adding climate change, physical and economic infrastructure, and political culture, a larger and intriguing picture emerges—a potentially robust response to the Trump Administration’s ferocious opposition to climate-smart policies.

Why add these particular elements? First, they are critical to the prosperity and wellbeing of urban economies in the 21^st century. As has been widely noted, a “climate-smart” economy—clean-energy technologies, green buildings and infrastructure, energy-efficient heating and cooling systems, electric vehicles, water-efficient utilities, and more—is growing rapidly and becoming a driver of urban wealth creation and a means to reduce the cost of living for households. At the same time, the risks of severe physical damage and business disruption from climate changes is growing; examples already exist worldwide and climate science tells us that things are only going to get worse. The cities, states, and regions that will be big winners in the emerging economy are those that take climate change seriously, as an opportunity and a threat, by forging the political leadership and consensus needed to invest in innovation and infrastructure. Second, these elements lend themselves to geographic mutuality, the connection and alignment among metropolitan regions and states that makes it possible to generate shared benefits that an individual city or state cannot realize by itself. As strategist Parag Khanna argues in Connectography, the global trends of urban connectivity across national borders, devolution of authority from central capitals to provinces and cities, and competition over global supply chains, energy markets, and flows of finance, technology, knowledge, and talent all lead “smaller political units” like cities and states to fuse together so they have the resources needed to survive.

Applying the climate economy lens reveals that these coastal urban agglomerations—the metro areas and states of the Pacific and Atlantic zones—look pretty similar, and quite different from much of the rest of the nation.

When it comes to climate change, California, Massachusetts, New York, and other coastal states and the cities we’ve mentioned are national and international leaders in reducing GHG emissions and building climate resilience and, In many cases, they have achieved strong “vertical” alignment of local and state policies. They are adopting and implementing public policies that require new and existing buildings to meet strict standards for energy consumption; transition as much energy supply as they control with renewable sources; promote a shift from driving to walking, bicycling, and use of public transit; and remove potential sources of GHG emissions from the waste stream. They are using their resources to stimulate the emergence of “green economy” businesses and jobs—especially clean-energy technologies—as a robust and sustainable sector. They are taking steps to assess the risks they face from increasing climate turbulence, to plan actions that will make them “climate proof,” and to develop the community, technical, and financial capacities to implement plans.

When it comes to infrastructure, the economies of the Climate Economy Zone’s two regions, especially their metropolitan areas, are based on a similar model for success: They are deeply embedded in the interconnected global trading economy and have developed, over the decades, world-leading business clusters in technology, finance, education and other sectors. They depend critically on competitive transportation and digital systems, corporate supply chain management, research and development assets, availability of financial capital, and well-educated and entrepreneurial talent. And they face similar challenges due to the national underinvestment in physical and communications infrastructure and the chronic underperformance of public education systems.

When it comes to political culture, the climate-economy regions have developed large constituencies and prominent stakeholder groups, including business leaders, which support aggressive climate action and have been willing to support substantial local changes, including increased public investment. They share a strong affinity for political leadership that fully acknowledges the practical and moral responsibilities of the nation, as well as its cities, to address climate change. One indicator of this is voting in the 2016 presidential election. In 10 of the 12 Zone’s states, Clinton defeated Trump by landslides, 10 to 29 percentage points, won another by 4 points, and narrowly lost one, while the District of Columbia went 92 percent for Clinton. Another indicator is found in survey data from Yale University: people in the Zone’s metropolitan areas and states are more likely than most other Americans to think that global warming is happening, caused mostly by human activities, and already harming people in the U.S., and that carbon emissions from power plants should be strictly limited and utilities should be required to produce 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources.

This sketch of the Climate Economy Zone suggests a potential for “horizontal” economic, infrastructure, and political collaboration at the regional level, multiple cities and states, which has only been minimally tapped so far. Pacific Zone states, for instance, are slouching toward a regional price on carbon emissions; California has a cap-and-trade market, while Washington and Oregon have explored options. The three states are developing the West Coast Electric Highway, a network of fast-charging stations located every 25 to 50 miles on Interstate 5and other roads. Six states in Atlantic Zone are part of a regional carbon-emissions trading market. Core cities on both coasts work together on aggressive climate actions: eight are members of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, six are in the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance, eight are among the 100 Resilient Cities.

But much more could be explored and perhaps done. We tend to think of public policy making as occurring along the traditional vertical axis of federal-state-local authority, and this obscures the potential of horizontal approaches. We tend to think of cities as locations, and this obscures their growing interest and engagement in international relations. We tend to think of climate change as a problem of reducing GHG emissions through national government regulation of energy markets, but this obscures the crucial role of corporations and cities as end users in the energy supply chain. If we were to think more about Climate Economy regions not as separate states and separate urban regions, but as “countries within the country” that align around a shared framework of public policies to address climate change, business growth, and urban development—what opportunities might be revealed?

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