How green is your city? Towards an index of urban sustainability
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How green is your city: towards an index of urban sustainability
John Rennie Short, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
More than half of the world’s population lives in cities and that percentage continues to rise, making cities critical areas for adopting practices to preserve natural resources.
How green is your city? How does it match up to other cities? Is it making progress in becoming more sustainable?
There is no definitive list but we may be moving toward clearer answers to these questions. An exciting body of work is coming up with ways to measure the environmental impact of cities. Let’s look at three.
Land, energy, water
The ecological footprint measures how much land and water area a city requires to produce the resources it consumes and to absorb its wastes.
Ecological footprint is measured in global hectares (gha) per capita. The global average is around 2.6. The footprint of London UK, for example, was measured at 4.5, slightly lower than the UK average of 4.6. ...
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