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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
The future of suburbs: urban resilience?
James Goodman, April 11th 2008, Cities, Built environment
It’s difficult to generalise about suburbs. The classic British image of cul-de-sacs lined with parked cars doesn’t cover it – Notting Hill in central London was built as a suburb, and many Parisian suburbs are high rise and have the feel of the inner city.
So, as Richard Rogers reminded us last Wednesday night at Forum For The Future’s Ahead of the Agenda seminar ‘Can suburbs make a comeback?’, it’s easier to talk about density. Suburbs tend to be less densely populated – between 2 and 28 people per hectare according to Southampton University.
Given that over 80% of Brits live in suburbs – with similar proportions in Europe and North America – they are strangely absent from talk of sustainable future cities. We’re more used to visions of super-urban, high-density, mixed-use, bike-able or walkable metropolises, with the odd monorail thrown in. It’s not easy to see how that vision can be superimposed on a settlement pattern that makes a virtue of private (not public) space and since the 1930s has largely been predicated on ownership of a car.
But one way or another, something has got to change. For a start, a bit of in-filling wouldn’t go amiss. Increase the population density of suburbs by just four people per hectare and you could accommodate all of the expected population growth in the UK for the next 40 years without having to touch a single green field*. That’s just one or two more houses in every suburban hectare.
And we could use suburbs to make towns and cities more resilient in coping with future stresses. Droughts, flooding, power failure, food shortages, pandemic…any number of future challenges could stretch a city’s infrastructure to breaking point. Suburbs could act as ‘redundancy’ in the city’s system, providing the spare capacity that might make a city stronger at times of crisis. In practical terms this could mean siting more allotments and market gardens in suburbs, as well as micro-reservoirs, water meadows or marsh for drainage, micro-renewable power stations, and more public shared space for people to meet in. Suburbs could be the great untapped resource of a sustainable urban future.
*That’s a back-of–the-envelope calculation by the way. Some estimate a 2050 UK population of 70 million, up from 60 million today (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7055285.stm). Around 50 million (84%) Brits live in suburbs. Assuming an average population density of 20 people per hectare, that means 2,520,000 hectares of suburbia. We would be able to house all extra 10 million people by increasing the average density to 24/ha. If the average density of suburbs is lower than 20/ha that means that suburbia must be more extensive than 2,520,000 ha and there is even more space in suburbs to put the extra people.
Richard Rogers speaking on the future of the suburbs
Alex Johnson, April 4th 2008, Cities, Retail
Richard Rogers speaks at the Forum for the Future/Tesco retail seminar on how suburbs can become sustainable. (use headphones)
Jonathon Porritt speaks at the launch of our Bristol project - video
Alex Johnson, March 18th 2008, Cities, Forum founders
Jonathon Porritt, on behalf of Forum for the Future, explains to an audience of local sustainability experts the great opportunity that Bristol city region's 10 year plan to become sustainable represents.
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