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

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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.

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The Green List 2007

Imogen Martineau, November 5th 2007, Business, Metrics

We like lists. And we like most things green. So the publication today of the The Guardian's Green List has been a great start to our week. The 32-page supplement shows the direct and indirect emissions of the FTSE 100 companies (where these are publicly available), the social costs of these emissions and whether or not the companies have a published carbon dioxide reduction policy.

We've been working with the Guardian in the last few months to collate this data, and have contributed our analysis of the 10 largest companies in the world.

Visit our projects page to find out more and see the results.

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The sustainable cities index

Peter Madden, October 20th 2007, Cities, Metrics

Brighton and Hove is the most sustainable city in Britain. That's the conclusion of our latest report, The Sustainable Cities Index.

The report comes at a time when the race to be a truly ‘sustainable city’ is increasingly competitive, with Manchester determined to become ‘the Greenest City in Britain by 2010’, Bristol wanting to become a ‘Green Capital’ and London aiming for nothing less than the status of ‘most sustainable city in the world’.

Aiming to cut through the rhetoric, the new report brings rigour to the debate by using current data to determine who’s sustainable and who’s not. In it, each of the UK’s 20 largest cities are analysed according to three criteria – their ‘environmental impact', ‘quality of life’ and ‘future proofing’ – and given an overall ranking which summarises the results.

The data reveals that Brighton and Hove is the most sustainable city followed by Edinburgh in second place and Bristol in third. Liverpool comes bottom of the list, after Hull in 18th place and Birmingham in 19th.

In the UK, around nine in ten people live in towns and cities. Globally, we are now a majority urban world. We have no choice but to learn to live together in sustainable ways in cities. This will mean providing a high quality of life for all residents. It will also mean reducing the wider environmental impact of cities. Forum for the Future chose three baskets of indicators against which to rank the cities.

• The Environmental Impact of the city – the impact of the city on the wider environment in terms of resource use and pollution

• The Quality of Life for residents – what the city is like to live in for all its citizens.

• Future Proofing – how well the city is preparing itself for a sustainable future.

Forum selected these index categories to reflect the sustainability of each city in a fair and balanced way. We used a total of 13 indicators, spread across the three baskets. The indicators use existing data on aspects of performance on which cities are already expected to make improvements. We intend to measure these indicators year-on-year.

Commenting on the findings of the research, Peter Madden CEO of Forum for the Future said:

“We are an increasingly urban world. Britain, with its strong civic tradition, should be leading the way in sustainable city-living. We hope this index will make our cities better places to live, with a lower overall impact on the environment. We also hope it will encourage some healthy competition amongst our big cities to see who is greenest.”

Commenting on the city’s position at the top of the rankings, Brighton and Hove City council leader Brian Oxley said:

"It's really good that council policy on this is actually translating into eco-friendly measures and that these have been recognised. These range from higher than average bus use to new the development near Brighton Station achieving the Ecohomes Excellent rating. Although we're only one city, we are a famous place and hopefully we're helping spread the message that acting locally could make the difference globally."

Click here to visit our projects page and download the report

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