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sustainable city strategies

Sustainable City Strategies

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by Admin

How do cities achieve strategic sustainability goals and change?

Cities are complex and involve many stakeholders so achieving change can be difficult, slow and require a wide range of mechanisms. It is not sufficient to have a high-level strategy; real change requires strategic targets to be integrated and driven by policies and programs and publicity and incentives to change behavior are often also required.

However, how do we know required change is being achieved? For this, effective monitoring and evaluation are required to understand what works, and what does not. This should track indicators that are linked to strategic targets and ideally be available in databases that are publically available and easy to access.

Interesting work in this area is the public open database developed by Charlottesville in the USA. This has 72 datasets which can be used to track performance in relation to strategic goals. This can be accessed here.

Can-do Cities

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The complexity of cities and the wide range of stakeholders make it difficult for cities to change rapidly. However, climate change means that cities need to adopt approaches that provide results quicker. A key to this is ensuring that city stakeholders understand strategic sustainability goals and

A key to this is ensuring that city stakeholders understand strategic sustainability goals and support their achievement. An interesting approach is being developed in the UK by the Can-do Cities initiative which provides detailed information on energy efficiency and carbon emission reduction for UK cities. This is provided for most larger cities in the UK enabling residents to find out what is happening in their cities and why it is important. Messages are delivered in a punchy, highly direct way, for example:

  • Liverpool spent a total of £656 million last year on all of its energy and fuel bills
  • That means that 5.5% of everything that is earned leaves the area to pay the energy bill
  • If it invested in all of the profitable energy efficiency and low carbon options, total energy bills would be cut by £132 million a year

The campaign can be accessed here.