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Communities need skills to make the most of a Green Investment Bank
Will Dawson, July 3rd 2010, Cities, Climate change, Finance, Public Sector
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The Green Investment Bank will be a big step towards a sustainable future, but the government must ensure that it unlocks the potential of local authorities and community groups as well as business.
The Green Investment Bank Commission’s report calls for the government to set up a flexible bank to reduce the risk to private investors investing in greening our power supply, increasing the energy efficiency of our buildings and our transport systems.
The bank, as proposed, would represent a big step towards a low-carbon economy, bringing greater energy security, new jobs and a higher quality of life. Big advances in green infrastructure, like offshore wind farms, are crucial to change at the speed we need to see in the UK to meet carbon targets.
Yet there is much that a community-led approach to an energy revolution can bring too. And this can create local skilled jobs, strengthen community ties and help people lift themselves to a higher quality of life. Communities in energy cooperatives have saved a third off their energy bills just by changing their behaviour, offshore wind doesn’t do this. So I was delighted that the commission has understood the role of financial investment in this community-led approach too.
However, we also need investment in skills to enable local government and community groups to take advantage of this funding opportunity. At Forum for the Future we have been working with West Sussex County Council, the South East of England Development Agency and a group of local authorities and community enterprises in our Climate Finance initiative to find out how to do this, and making great progress with some inspiring people. Other initiatives like the Ashden Awards and the Low Carbon Communities Challenge are also leading the way.
The challenge now is to scale up so that every community takes action. The advisory group of experts we have been working with are often translators between sustainability and finance teams within local government. Good opportunities are often missed due to a lack of understanding. If we could develop these skills, then local authorities and groups like Transition Towns and energy co-ops will be the experts, creating the new ways of financing local investment in carbon reduction such as green bonds.
Without this development of local skills, most of the funds raised by a Green Investment Bank will go to big businesses to support big projects. This government has led on a big society agenda and the prospect of a Green Investment Bank presents a real opportunity for local people to take action for their future. But it must ensure they have the skills to do the job. The commission’s ambition is to have the bank up and running in six months so we have no time to lose.
Australian Sustainable Cities Index
Matthew Trigg, June 15th 2010, Cities, Built environment
As a citizen of the UK and Australia I have long been aware of the similarities between our two countries across numerous environmental, political and social issues, including the impact the rapid expansion of cities is having on natural ecosystems.
In the lead up to the next Federal Government election (expected before the end of 2010), the Australian Conservation Foundation saw a need to highlight the lack of action towards creating more sustainable cities. This became part of our broader campaign to reinvigorate environmental debate in Australia. For example, many Australians are feeling particularly deflated about climate change, with the Federal Government’s proposed Emissions Trading Scheme first diluted and finally scrapped, and no clear long-term policies from the Opposition.
So in November last year all of our national campaigners flew into Melbourne from our six different offices around Australia to collaborate and generate ideas about how we can move the debate forward in each of our campaigns areas. Central to this was the idea of ranking our largest cities to determine which is the most sustainable and in doing so to highlight those areas where Federal, State, Territory and Local Governments need to take action.
Already aware of the excellent Sustainable Cities Index from Forum for the Future, I saw this as a great place to start. It didn’t take long at all to get everyone on board, but at that time no one had any idea just how big it would become!
Launched on 15 June, the ACF (Australian) Sustainable Cities Index ranks our 20 largest cities on 15 different indicators, determining for the first time our most and least sustainable cities. Darwin, our northern most capital and Australia’s ‘gateway to Asia’, has come out as our most sustainable city. Perth, capital of Western Australia and home to Australia’s resources boom, has come out as comparatively the least sustainable city in 2010.
That said, no city has done well across all of the indicators. There is a long way to go before any Australian city can be held up as a champion of sustainable urban development.
While we based our method on the Forum for the Future Index, we had to discard, adapt or replace many of the indicators to suit the unique Australian context and respond to the quantity and quality of data available. Our 15 indicators were:
Air Quality
Ecological Footprint
Green Building
Water
Biodiversity
Health
Density
Subjective Wellbeing
Transport
Employment
Climate Change (policy)
Public Participation
Education
Household Repayments
Food Production
In the face of developing social and cultural challenges, we see cities as central to the work of creating a healthy and sustainable future for all Australians. The ACF Sustainable Cities Index encourages healthy competition, stimulates meaningful discussion and suggests new ways of thinking about how our cities can be not only sustainable, but move toward environmentally positive outcomes.
Thanks to the team at Forum for the Future we have been able to work from a solid base to create something that has been extremely well received publicly and politically.
Matthew Trigg is Smart Cities Project Coordinator at the Australian Conservation Foundation
What's in store for city-dwellers in 2040?
Ivana Gazibara, April 26th 2010, Cities, Built environment, Futures, General, Transport
Imagine a world where each morning, you and your family hop in your self-driving hydrogen vehicle. You program your destination into the digital journey planner, and settle into an onboard breakfast around the table, as your h-pod gets you to where you need to go. After dropping the kids off at school, you leave the h-pod to refuel at the local energy hub while you work in the neighbourhood smartoffice, using avatars to connect with colleagues in a virtual conference room.
Sounds futuristic? Welcome to Sustainable Urban Mobility: 2040.
In partnership with Vodafone, FIA Foundation and EMBARQ, the Sustainable Urban Mobility: 2040 (SUM2040) project aims to help key constituencies in global cities – including government planners, urban designers, businesses and civil society groups - find long-term, sustainable urban mobility solutions. It does this by exploring coherent, plausible scenarios of the world 30 years from now. By mobility, we mean transport but also the other means of access to goods and services people need in daily lives that may act as a substitute for physical movement – from ICT, to different ways of urban design.
We’re now halfway through the project and at a point where we’ve done extensive research and consulted a wide range of experts and the insights that have come out have been fascinating. Before the scenarios for mobility in 2040 are written and published, I wanted to share some top-line thoughts about how your city might look in the future.
People-friendly cities: The concept of cities designed for people, not cars, will grow. What does this mean in practice? Urban design focused on developing local neighbourhoods as opposed to more urban sprawl, for a start. People will increasingly choose to live, work and play in the same area. The local street will undergo a renaissance, with small shops popping up again, more footpaths, more green space, and efficient, 24-hour use of community infrastructure, such as the local school doubling as a community centre after hours.
Mobility-on-demand: When people do venture out of their neighbourhood, they will probably be able to connect much more smoothly and quickly between different modes of transport. They’ll check air quality or traffic conditions on their mobile, laptop or using public access touch screens before setting out. Far fewer people will need to own vehicles – they’ll be able to rent cars, electric scooters, bicycles and other modes at mobile rental hubs that can easily be shifted around the city in response to changes in demand.
The changing shape of the office: In the 20th century, we got stuck in traffic jams every morning while commuting to head office. Experts expect this to change. We are already seeing more home working and video conferencing. This trend will grow and fundamentally change the way office spaces look and feel. Companies will likely build smaller, decentralised working centres. They may even use existing neighbourhood infrastructure – from the local coffee shop to the community centre – for flexible working arrangements.
The wired automobile: The car itself will be transformed. Manufacturers are already thinking about how to incorporate ICT into vehicles, and odds are that over the next 30 years we will see this trend become much more mainstream. Expect, more information and entertainment; automated navigation that supersedes bad driving for optimized safety; and cars that are able to communicate with other vehicles on the road.
Inclusive mobility: Thirty years on, we will still have significant low-income populations, for which tailored mobility solutions will be designed, enabling a greater degree of access to goods and services and more employment opportunities. The mobile phone penetration in the developing world has already shown us the potential of ICT to enhance mobility for the poor, by providing an affordable, quick way to connect to the market by phone rather than on foot, and by allowing delivery of previously inaccessible services such as banking.
Partnerships redefined: As the sustainability challenges facing cities grow, and traditional ways of operating become more and more difficult, we will increasingly form hybrid value chains - business models where commercial partnerships are established between businesses and citizen sector organizations (e.g. NGOs) in order to transform markets and meet critical human needs. Government, business and civil society will likely be working together in much more creative, collaborative ways than ever before. This could include handing over areas of governance to local NGOs and outsourcing operations to local businesses. Nothing we haven’t seen before – but odds are we’ll be seeing more of it in the future.
Needless to say, this will not play out across the board. We are exploring different pathways for these trends and the corresponding societal responses through our scenarios. These will be shared shortly our workshops in Mumbai and Istanbul this June, and published in the autumn. We will be sharing updates as we go along, so stay tuned for more!
http://www.forumforthefuture.org/projects/sustainable-urban-mobility
Balance makes Newcastle Britain’s most sustainable city
Helen Clarkson, November 19th 2009, Cities, Built environment, General, Public Sector
Today we unveil our third annual Sustainable Cities Index and the big news is that Newcastle is Britain’s most sustainable city, knocking the previous two winners – Bristol and Brighton – into second and third places respectively.
This might come as a big surprise as unlike those other cities, Newcastle doesn’t have a reputation for being particularly ‘green’. But Newcastle has won because it does fairly well across the whole set of indicators we use to capture a balanced picture of cities’ sustainability, with no particular area of weakness.
The Sustainable Cities Index ranks Britain’s 20 largest cities according to their performance in three broad areas: their impact on the environment, their citizens’ quality of life, and their readiness for future challenges. Both Bristol and Brighton have great scores on our quality of life and future-proofing indicators, but perform less well on environmental impact, bringing them down overall.
For me that reinforces one of the key messages about sustainability, that it’s all about striking a balance between the economic, the environmental and the social, and avoiding trade-offs.
It’s also interesting that our cities that do have green reputations are weaker on environmental indicators than others. That could suggest that some of their reputation is built on the quality of life they offer, so maybe people do understand being green in that broader sense. Good news for those of us who make our living saying just that!
With all the talk over the last year about green economic recovery, we also thought it was timely to ask what that means at a city level. People use the term to mean a lot of different things from making existing business more energy efficient, right through to challenging the capitalist economic model.
We’ve found that there is plenty that local authorities can be doing to promote green economic recovery at different levels. They can work with businesses to understand their reliance on the local environment and society, they can direct their own spend on to more sustainable goods and services, and they can encourage and promote the innovation that we’ll need to move into a more sustainable future.
Our winning city – Newcastle – is located in the country’s first designated Low Carbon Economic Area. Manchester has plans to build on its industrial heritage to lead the way to a cleaner future. And Birmingham is also thinking about its contribution to the next industrial revolution.
Cities that find the sweet-spot of low-carbon innovation that grows the local economy, providing jobs and better quality of life will be the truly sustainable cities of tomorrow. The race is on.
The Prince & the frog
Hannah Bullock, May 8th 2009, Cities
I never thought I’d see Prince Charles sat next to a frog on the sofa. Nor that I’d be at the same sort of press launch as a journalist from The Sun. How things have moved on: our royalty appearing in animated films on YouTube, and our page three newspaper embracing climate change.
I don’t know if it was the nice touch of getting the Prince to feature next to his fairytale alter-ego, as it were, the genius of the animators from The Golden Compass, or perhaps Daniel Craig’s entreating eyes on the screen – but the best of the papers and news channels turned up to see yesterday’s unveiling of a 90-second film by the Prince’s Rainforests Project.
The frog’s a great little character that’s cute enough to keep us all watching while Charles says a few sombre words about deforestation and carbon emissions. And for those in the know, there’s the added subtlety that it’s a ‘species indicator’ for forests.
So let’s just hope that YouTubers get it – because there wasn’t much in the film on how forests help absorb carbon (perhaps I’ve got too used to the calibre of Green Futures readers), or even how viewers can help – except by signing up on www.rainforestSOS.org to kind of, ya know, show they care.
And if they do make it to the site, I wonder if they’ll go for the fun stuff – the ‘mash up’ where they get to put their own face in the film – or opt for the much more strenuous option B: read the hefty report on forest conservation and financing. Er, I know we at Green Futures would lap it up, but I can bet you which one most people would choose...
And I do wonder how much we can rely on YouTube as a magic button that immediately spreads good ideas as fast as swine flu. Call me a dinosaur (yes I’m still holding out against Facebook), but surely a site is only as interested in spreading the word as its users?
West of England takes up carbon cutting challenge
Paul Rainger, May 1st 2009, Cities
Will Bristol Zoo be tackling its animals’ greenhouse gas emissions? That’s what journalists wanted to know as we launched the West of England Carbon Challenge today.
The zoo is one of the nine founder members of the Carbon Challenge who are making a public commitment to cut their CO2 emissions by 10% from current levels by 2012.
Reporters were hoping for a story about action to stop zoo animals’ natural emissions. Methane, after all, is a highly potent greenhouse gas. In practice, the zoo believes it can make the biggest difference by helping its visitors make low-carbon journeys.
Cutting carbon is a serious business for all businesses and public organisations. They know the UK Government has set a target of reducing emissions by 34% by 2020 (from 1990 levels). And from next year, the Carbon Reduction Commitment will require organisations with annual electricity bills of about £500,000 or more to buy permits for the CO2 they produce. It’s probably just the start of ever more stringent regulation in this area.
So forward thinking businesses leaders, who want to remain successful and prosperous are rushing to take action now to become more energy efficient - saving money and carbon.
That's why Forum for the Future is launching the West of England Carbon Challenge today at the Prince of Wales' May Day Network event in Bristol. We believe we are unique in targeting organisations across all sectors in a single region, requiring them to commit to a fixed target for cutting carbon emissions and supporting them with the practical guidance and resources they need to achieve those reductions.
That’s why some of the West of England’s leading organisations have already joined Bristol Zoo in pledging to meet the 10% target - Capgemini, the University of the West of England, the Halcrow Group, Arup, Buro Happold, Sustain IT Solutions, the South West Regional Development Agency and the Homes and Communities Agency (SW Region).
And that's why many more are joining here in Bristol today, and will continue to do so over the coming months.
As Jonathon Porritt said, launching the scheme this morning: "The science is proven, and we can stall no longer. Responsible organisations are showing that they are ready to do their bit to prevent catastrophic climate change."
That’s what the Forum's West of England Carbon Challenge is about - taking action.
Homes fit for the future
Ben Ross, March 18th 2009, Cities, Built environment
Last June, in the Green Futures supplement The Future is Retrofit, we referred to the existing housing stock as 'the elephant in the room'. It feels like we’ve come a long way since then.
Domestic energy demand and its associated carbon emissions are breaking into our news media, and the government is mid-way through three consultations on increasing the energy efficiency of our homes. While insulation still isn’t exactly sexy, it is becoming a dinner party discussion, rather than a conversation killer.
Nationally, we’re still working out the best way to deal with this enormous pachyderm in our midst…do we push or pull it, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century? Considering the size of the beast (our homes are responsible for 27% of the UK’s carbon emissions) it’s going to take a lot of both, but we’ve got to be careful which bits we push/pull, and how hard, to avoid the law of unintended consequences. We don’t want to bolt on ‘eco-bling’ before we’ve increased the thermal envelope of the building.
We’ve taken on this challenge as part of our project to help make Bristol the UK’s most sustainable city-region. ‘Refit West’ is a consortium of local housing experts and specialist delivery partners coordinated by Forum for the Future. The scheme aims to overcome a number of the main barriers: raising demand through a savy marketing and PR campaign; providing loan finance to encourage uptake; and building a strong coalition of trusted surveyors and builders to do the works to a high standard with minimum disruption.
Projects will prioritise demand reduction and efficiency before the installation of low- or zero-carbon energy generation. With the aim being to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the scheme will also offer opportunities to reduce water consumption and waste sent to landfill.
We’ll pilot the scheme this summer by refitting 10 demonstration homes for the main housing types in the area. Then from the autumn onwards, as the heating season returns, we’ll be scaling up our activities. We aim to have completed works on the first 1,000 homes by the end of 2011.
There are people out there who have reduced the CO2 emissions from their homes by 60% or more (27 of them are part of the Old Home Super Home network), which shows that this is technically possible. However, these trail blazers represent just 0.000001% of our 27 million dwellings in the UK.
Our current housing stock represents one of the simplest and most cost-effective approaches to carbon abatement. Government is currently proposing that all of our homes will have received a ‘whole house’ package of energy efficiency measures by 2030 and that domestic carbon emissions should be approaching zero by 2050.
It’s a massive project, and one that will affect every single person in the UK, as our homes are made fit for the future. However, one thing is increasingly clear - if we don’t tackle home energy efficiency at large scale that elephant won’t just quietly slip out the back door but will become increasingly dangerous, trampling any chance we have of hitting our national carbon targets.
Sustainable Cities Index 2008 - update
Peter Madden, November 25th 2008, Cities, Metrics
Today we republish the rankings in our second annual Sustainable Cities Index. I'd like to take this opportunity to apologise on behalf of Forum for the Future for the clerical error which distorted our original tables.
We take the index very seriously. We have chosen our indicators because they measure things which councils can act on to improve the quality of their citizens' lives, the environment of their cities, and to future proof against a changing climate.
We know that councils benchmark their performance against this data and therefore it’s essential for it to be accurate. So when we were made aware of an error in our air quality figures we took the report off our website and launched a thorough review of all our data. We will be learning lessons to make sure this does not happen again.
What has changed as a result? Not much. The top eight cities are still in the same positions. Liverpool, Birmingham and Hull remain in the bottom four places. There have been minor moves: Liverpool is up two places; Coventry down two; London, Bradford, Sunderland and Leeds are all up one; Nottingham, Glasgow and Birmingham are down one.
The fact is that the revised index still paints much the same picture as the original one. Individual cities may have moved slightly in comparison with each other, but it still tells the same story about where each has been successful and what challenges they still face.
The index has received widespread coverage. We are now reviewing the media articles and where we feel the new figures fundamentally change the published story we will contact the newspaper, magazine or website concerned.
We will be releasing a revised report on our 2008 Sustainable Cities Index on our website in the next few days and we will send complementary copies to councils in all 20 cities. In the meantime, here are the correct 2008 rankings.
2008 rank (2007 rank)
1 (3) Bristol
2 (1) Brighton & Hove
3 (4) Plymouth
4 (8) Newcastle
5 (6) Cardiff
6 (2) Edinburgh
7 (7) Sheffield
8 (14) Leicester
9 (10) London
10= (9) Bradford
10= (11) Nottingham
12 (13) Sunderland
13 (5) Leeds
14 (17) Coventry
15 (12) Manchester
16 (16) Wolverhampton
17 (20) Liverpool
18 (15) Glasgow
19 (19) Birmingham
20 (18) Hull
Sustainable Cities Index 2008
Helen Clarkson, November 10th 2008, Cities, Metrics
Forum for the Future has published its 2nd annual Sustainable Cities Index. The easy headlines are that Bristol has leapfrogged Brighton and Hove to take first place, Newcastle has risen up the rankings to become the only northern city in the top five, and three of the bottom four places are still held by Birmingham, Liverpool and Hull.
It gets more interesting when you look behind the rankings. The exercise ranks the cities against one another and is designed to help city leaders benchmark themselves against meaningful indicators which they can do something about, like recycling rates and readiness for climate change.
But it doesn’t mean that Bristol is a genuinely sustainable city, it’s just faring better across the board than others in the UK. Furthermore, Britain’s cities lag behind international rivals on sustainability and we lack the shining examples that others can come and learn from.
Looking at those international cities that are raising the bar on sustainability – such as Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, we can see that their success now is due to far-sighted policies in the 70s and 80s, which are coming to fruition now.
Back in the 70s when the rest of the US was embracing shopping malls, Portland enacted strong land-use policies, which set the city boundary and encouraged housing density. This means that now it can aspire to be a “20 minute city” where citizens will spend no more than 20 minutes travelling to work, shop, or play. They are currently in the process of updating the Portland Plan which aims to take the lead on “sustainable, equitable, and economically viable long-range planning”.
As part of the work for the Index, we interviewed nine UK city leaders (both elected Leaders and Chief Executives of the city councils) and got their views on leadership in cities. They shared the view that good leaders will have a vision which they can articulate, be passionate about and motivate people to follow. Looking at those international examples we think it needs to go further than this. If a uniting vision isn’t sustainable in itself then trying to graft sustainability onto it results in a strategy full of compromises and trade-offs. A strategy, like Portland’s, which is driven by questions such as “How can we design a city which thrives whilst minimizing carbon emissions?”, is more likely to lead to long-term success than one where sustainability is an after-thought.
We’ve seen a similar shift with companies. As we noted in our Leader Business Strategies report back in January, companies we work with have moved from asking us "What should our sustainability strategy be for our business?", to "What should our business strategy be, in the light of sustainability?" Substitute the word ‘cities’ for ‘business’ and this is how we need our city leaders to be thinking.
Leicester City has recently released just such a plan “One Leicester", which includes ambitions such as “Planning for People Not Cars”. We believe visions like this, which are driven by the principles of sustainability, will lead to real change for British cities, and we hope that increasingly city leaders look to sustainability for the answers to the pressing questions they are dealing with, rather than seeing it as one more agenda to addressed alongside all the others.
This blog entry has been amended to reflect revisions to the Index. City rankings have changed slightly after corrections to an error in the air quality data.
Putting my best foot forward with walkit.com Bristol
Susan Warren, October 1st 2008, Cities, Transport
Today I took on the BBC in a rush-hour race to their Bristol studios. I left Temple Meads Station on foot and arrived safe, sound and full of energy 15 minutes ahead of the BBC reporter, who travelled by bus.
Radio Bristol issued the challenge on the day we launched walkit.com in Bristol, as part of our Sustainable Bristol City Region programme. walkit.com is a great website which provides all the essential information for anyone considering a journey on foot within a 5km radius of the city centre. You simply put in the two points you want to travel between, which then generates a map and directions and also shows the health and environmental benefits of choosing to walk.
So my walkit.com map for my rush hour race showed me journey time (25mins) calories burnt (150) and CO2 emissions saved in comparison to taking the car, bus or taxi (average 0.5kg).
Needless to say BBC Radio Bristol were impressed, particularly by all the detail that walkit.com provides for each journey taken. The launch generated a great deal of interest, with Bristol City Council Leader Helen Holland lending her support to the importance of encouraging people to get out of their cars in such a walkable city.
We have high hopes for walkit.com in Bristol, and are aiming for up to 20,000 users and over 50,000 walking routes generated in the first year. Evidence from users of walkit.com in other cities identifies that 90% are encouraged to walk ahead of other transport modes, with over 75% encouraged to take extra physical exercise. So watch this space for updates on how walkit.com is working in Bristol.
Choosing to get out of your car for short journeys makes great sense. It’s free, is good for your general health and well-being, and also reduces your carbon footprint into the bargain. A resource like walkit.com is just what we need to support people to try a different way of travelling, both for work and leisure.
We are very grateful to Bristol Primary Care Trust, Bristol City Council and Triodos Bank for their support in the development and launch of this website.
Susan Warren heads up the Forum’s Sustainable Bristol City Region Programme
Registered charity number 1040519
