Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
carbon footprints
which measures the greenhouse gas emissions per person, house-
hold, city or country, and has been developed in the University of California in
Berkeley (CF).
Although the methods used by these footprint calculations vary and hence pro-
duce different results, they do provide an initial and dramatic summary of the extent
of the sustainability problem. This has led many people, organizations and cities
to take stock of their values and seek ways of reducing the footprint through vari-
ous methods, many of which are discussed in the rest of this chapter and the next.
Other approaches are more comprehensive in using various variables to measure
the degree of sustainability in cities, although most only use some of the range of
concepts outlined in Fig.
5.1
and are not consistent with one another. However there
have been major efforts by the European Commission to arrive at common indica-
tors, such as those produced in 2003 to allow local municipalities to define their
level of sustainability (ECI
2003
). In addition there are sign of progress in attempts
to produce more consistent and hence comparable indicators, through the global
protocol measuring greenhouse gas emissions at a community scale, created by the
World Bank and the United National Environmental Programme and announced
at the 5th World Bank's Urban Forum, March 2010 (WB
2010
). But there is still a
long way to go before consistent and useful indicators that are universally accepted
are derived. Perhaps the most comprehensive of recent schemes to measure urban
sustainability in terms of dimensional coverage and in world-wide urban applica-
tion, was developed by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU
2012
) through spon-
sorship by the Siemens Engineering Group. In Europe 30 indicators derived from 8
general content categories were used to construct what is called a
Green Index
for
the major cities; a similar approach was used for other continents. These indicators
are shown in Fig.
5.2
but have been further generalized to four higher order descrip-
tive domains to clarify the range and utility of the concepts used, which can be seen
to relate to: Critical Resource Inputs (of Water and Energy), Damaging Outputs
(such as Air Quality, CO
2
, and Waste), Infrastructures (Buildings and Transport),
and Governance (relating to Environmental Management).
It obvious that these indicators are dominated by variables that relate to physical
characteristics, not human capacities, and do not cover the range of issues identi-
fied in Table
5.1
, although they do contain management dimensions. Nevertheless
it does provide a useful, mainly physical snapshot at the comparative sustainability
of major cities in Europe and other continents. Once the data on the individual vari-
ables were obtained for major cities these values were arranged on the same scale so
they could be summarized to create an index score for each city, running on a scale
from 0 to 100. The same approach was used create the same type of index for major
cities in other continents. However the lack of quantitative data for many variables
in the South American, African and Asian large cities meant that the results for these
continents were only able to only show the relative position of the cities chosen in
five categories and are only relative within each continent and arranged in alpha-
betical order within each grade.
The Green Index Study of major European cities shows that Copenhagen, with a
score of 87.3, tops the list in terms of the environmental sustainability as measured
