Green A City

New City Need: Chief Risk Officer

Now that we've entered the verified era of global climate change, cities need to get ready for the greater likelihood of the unexpected, which may include according to the Fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stronger-than-average hurricanes, coastal storm surge flooding, catastrophic heat waves, and urban forest or brush fires.

Adaptation to climate change is a strategy that is coming into prominence alongside the mitigation efforts of climate change now occurring in most major North American cities.  Cities such as Chicago have recently fared well in reducing the impacts of potential catastrophic heat waves through the its Office of Emergency Management's deployment of cooling centers and outreach to the elderly and disabled when such events are forecast.

But what about the larger-scale events like Hurricane Katrina, or the 2003 heat wave that killed more than 14,000 in Paris and other parts of France? How do cities better prepare financially and organizationally for such levels of devastation?

Roger Ferguson, Chairman of Swiss Re America Holding Corporation, advised the world's largest city mayors that they consider developing a Chief Risk Officer role in their city to, "identify and assess emerging risks, to communicate risks, to help mitigate mega-risks that can't be covered by insurance companies alone."

"There is a need for a holistic approach to mitigate and adapt to climate change," said Ferguson as he addressed mayors from 32 of the world's largest cities at the C40 climate summit earlier this month in New York City.

SustainLane ranked the largest 50 US cities according to their risk for natural disasters in its US City Rankings. The top five in order of being most at risk: Miami (hurricanes, flooding); New Orleans (hurricanes, flooding); Oakland (earthquakes, wildfires); San Francisco (earthquakes, tsunamis, flooding); Honolulu (tsunami, flooding, earthquakes).

None of these cities have a Chief Risk Officer, though some smaller cities such as Johannesburg, South Africa do have such a position, and many corporations now staff a similar executive-level position.

Lagos Wide and Close: An interactive journey into an exploding city

SustainLane Government reviews another title in books/movies. Number 2 in a series... enjoy the three-day weekend! By Research Manager Richard Young. -Editor

Lagos Wide and Close: An interactive journey into an exploding city (DVD)

Rem Koolhaas, internationally renowned architect and urban designer, teams with documentary filmmaker Bregtje van der Haak to produce a multilayered video foray into the city of Lagos.

It's often said these days that most of the world's people are urbanites, but Lagos makes that statement seem trite. This coastal city in Nigeria is expected to top 24 million denizens by 2015, making it among the largest three cities in the world.

The megalopolis began to attract Rem Koolhaas in the early 1990s, and he returned repeatedly to this understudied city throughout the decade. His fascination with Lagos results in what he calls a "forced encounter" with a radically modern city, where the seemingly informal and random improvisations of people trying to survive are, upon closer reflection, made possible only because the city was planned as a generic modern city. It is solid planning that makes Lagos work.

"It's an extreme form of modernization," reports Koolhaas, "not some kind of 'African' city." And he suggests that people make brilliant use of cities even as systems go into "reverse," but there is still dependency on the original model.

Design Like You Give A Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises

Announcing... SustainLane Government book reviews! Whip out a pen and start your summer reading list. Today, Research Associate Ramsay Millie reviews a book which should be considered by city planners, architecture consultants, and anyone interested in sustainable development. Over the next few days we will post more reviews.   -Editor

Edited by: Architecture for Humanity

Everyone who touches this book on my coffee table is instantly immersed. Design Like You Give A Damn showcases low-cost sustainable solutions that solve some of the most troubling issues of the developing world.  Colorful pages display more than 80 innovative and contemporary solutions to such urgent needs as basic shelter, health care, education, and access to clean water, energy, and sanitation.  Alice Waters states, “This book brings forth the values of sustainability and diversity in a beautiful way—values which are as essential to our housing as they are to food we eat.”  A very powerful and thought provoking read.

-- Ramsay Millie, Research Associate, SustainLane Government

Carbon Tools Scale up for City-Wide Footprinting

by Warren Karlenzig
Reposted from WorldChanging

While personal carbon calculators are turning into a dime-a-dozen offering across the web, the unveiling of Zerofootprint’s carbon counter at the C40 Climate Summit last week ushers in a new era of a large scale web-based data warehousing that can aggregate carbon emission information from city government, companies, universities, neighborhoods, groups or families. [Full disclosure: Zerofootprint provided offsets for the Worldchanging book tour in 2006.]

Toronto Mayor David Miller announced that his city would be using the tool, called Zerofootprint Toronto, to calculate carbon emissions for the city's 50,000 employees this July. The free tool will also be available to others in the city, so that it begins to build a “bottom-up” analysis of carbon emissions complementing the “top-down” analysis cities, counties and local government are currently engaged in with groups such as another Toronto-based non-profit, ICLEI.

The mayor said Torontoans will be able to use the Internet-based tool to calculate their own carbon footprint--which includes the amount of energy and water used, waste generated, how they get around, consumption habits and food choices. Results can then be aggregated and sliced and diced so that profiles of city, neighborhood to glean personal carbon footprints. Zerofootprint runs on a database architecture developed by billion-dollar software company Business Objects, said Zerofootprint founder and CEO Ron Dembo, so it can scale up to millions of users because of its enterprise software backend.

ICLEI, which has a membership of over 550 local governments worldwide, is also updating its limited-user circa 1990s carbon emissions software to a tool accessible on the web that can run local government carbon calculations and data reports. The international non-profit is working with Microsoft to release the software by the end of 2007, according to a Microsoft executive.

$5 Billion to Green International City Buildings

Former President Clinton announced this afternoon a program to finance the greening of existing government buildings in three large American cities and eight international cities as part of the C40 Global Climate Summit in New York.

"This $5 billion will more than double the global market for building retrofits," Clinton said at a mid-town Manhattan Waldorf-Astoria press conference with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and London Mayor Ken Livingstone. "We will reduce greenhouse gas emissions place by place, building by building and block by block. We know what to do (with the problem of greenhouse gas emssions), we just need to get organized and get after it."

I see the program as a well-needed way to systematically reduce global climate impacts of existing buildings--as I was quoted in the AP story above--while also addressing the issue of climate change adaptation for cities.

Antonio Villaraigosa, right, Mayor of Los Angeles speaks to John Street, center, Mayor of Philadelphia and Ken Livingstone, left, Mayor of London during the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit in New York Wednesday, May 16, 2007.

Out of the 40 largest world cities, mayors from 32 showed up here to come up with financial and tactical strategies to combat global climate change. The event is being organized by the Clinton Foundation Global Climate Change initiative as well as the Partnerhsip for New York and Mayor Michael Bloomberg's office.

"Unfortunately, it has fallen to the mayors to do it because at the federal level in this country and other countries, they seem to be tied up," Bloomberg said in statement.

U.S. cities that will benefit from the fund announced today at the conference include New York, Chicago and Houston. Companies funding the initiative include Citi, Deutsche Bank, ABN AMRO, JPMorgan Chase and UBS, which will each contribute $1 billion upfront to finance the $5 billion effort.

Sadhu Johnston, Commissioner of the Environment for the city of Chicago told me this morning, "We're already underway working this out with building managers and operators."

Los Angeles and Philadelphia, two cities that belong to the C40 group were noticeably absent from the announcement and are investigating ways in which they may participate, according to a Clinton Foundation official I spoke with. Other participating global cities include Rome; Delhi, India; Karachi, Pakistan; Seoul, South Korea; Bangkok, Thailand; Melbourne, Australia; Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Johannesburg, South Africa.

When Clinton was asked if he liked working with mayors versus working with Congress or governors as president, he said: "Doing this is more satisfying. Mayors are in the business of doing. We're back in the solutions business." Clinton also weighed in on the promise of economic development for everything from biofuels, to electric engines as "long as oil is above $50 a barrel." And he touted distributed energy sources such as solar and wind power, particularly stressing the need for alternatives to a centralized electric grid in developing nations.

Honeywell, Johnson Control, Siemens and American Standard companies will be among the companies providing services ranging from implementing reflecting or white rooftops (a topic I blogged about the need for after California's epic July heat wave last summer) to more energy efficient sensor-controlled heating and cooling networks.

Green Economy versus the Gray Economy

The following is from a presentation given by SustainLane's Warren Karlenzig at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco on May 2, 2007, on the subject of green cities, with Jared Blumenfeld, director of the San Francisco Department of the Environment, and Ian Kim from the Reclaim the Future program at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland.

Thank you to the Commonwealth Club, and to the contributors of How Green is Your City?: Richard Young, Ken Ott and Frank Marquardt (and in absence, Rachel Yaseen and Paula White).

SustainLane.com has the largest directory of green businesses in the nation: 12,000 businesses and services, all part of an exploding green economy

That’s the Green Economy versus what I’m calling the Gray Economy.

What is the Gray Economy? Some might call it the “Old Economy” but that’s so old economy, ala the Dot Com era.

The Gray Economy is a larger and more timely concept than the so-called gray market, which is marginally legal but not ethical. Like the gray market, the Gray Economy is off the books. Get away with it if you can. Take the money and run: carbon, toxic pollutants and catastrophic global climate change are someone else’s—or another generation’s--problem.

Commonwealth Club Panel: How Green is Your City?

Tomorrow, Wednesday, May 2, I will be leading a panel from noon to 1 p.m. at the venerable Commonwealth Club in San Francisco ("The nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum") on our new book How Green is Your City? The SustainLane U.S. City Rankings.

Appearing with me will be the ever-entertaining Director of the Department of the Environment for San Francisco, Jared Blumenfeld--abandon your notions of a staid city bureaucrat--and Ian Kim from the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, which is leading up a "green collar" jobs program for the city.

It should be an enlightening discussion about the future of green cities, local jobs, economic development and clean tech in the 21st century, with representatives from the #2 city (San Francisco) and #5 city (Oakland) out of the largest 50 US cities profiled in How Green is Your City?

I'll be signing copies of the book and all three of us will field your questions. For those who can't make it because you're on the other side of the world, if you have any questions you want to post on this blog I'll try to ask them during tomorrow's panel.