How green is your city: towards an urban sustainability index

Click here to access my latest article in The Conversation, How green is your city: towards an urban sustainability index, that discusses metrics used to assess the ecological, carbon and water footprint of cities. As we transition into a more urban future, measuring, assessing and evaluating urban environmental impact of cities is of major importance. We are only just beginning the difficult task.  We need to refine these metrics, develop new ones and so create a standardized and easily understood index of city sustainability. With better data and a standard index, policies can be evaluated, targets set and institutions held to account. A robust city sustainability index would benchmark where we are now and provide a measure of progress in the future.  

A visualization of the daily carbon emissions of New York City. Each bubble represents one ton of CO2.

Forum on Urban Sustainability

I gave a keynote address, The New Imperative: Green Cities for an Urban World, at the French Embassy in Washington DC on 6 March 2015. The event was a forum  that brought together mayors from the US and France in a two day event to kick-start long-term and formal cooperation among officials and practitioners concerned with sustainable urban development in France and the United States. I learned a lot from  a great range of very interesting speakers from central and city governments, private companies and NGOs in France, USA and from around the world.  The forum is a lead up to the participation of cities in the December 2015 Paris Climate Conference.