Green Cities: A Guide for Sustainable Community Development

An exciting transformation is underway in neighborhoods around the world. Governments and the people they serve are embracing sustainable community development and taking action in their cities and towns and across national boundaries to protect the environment, address poverty and other social issues, and improve the quality of life now and for the future. Communities are discovering that when residents, local governments and business work together, destructive patterns of development can be transformed into beneficial outcomes that provide prosperity which is ecologically and socially sustainable.

Today, 49% of the world's population, or some 3.6 billion people, live in cities. By 2030, the figure is expected to rise to 61% (PDDESA-UN 2003). Large urban settlements face an increasing number of problems: severe environmental degradation, pollution, declines in water quality and availability, energy and food shortages, solid waste accumulation, housing affordability and availability, disease and poverty.

Harmony Foundations publication Green Cities: A Guide to Sustainable Community Development promotes and showcases community development initiatives which are environmentally sound and socially just and encourages public officials, municipal planners and community leaders to exercise visionary leadership and bring people together to take action which meets local needs while addressing regional, national and international objectives.

Population

• Since 1950, world population has more than doubled.
• In 1950, 30% of the world's population lived in cities. In 2000, it had risen to 47%. By 2030, it is estimated that 60% of the world's population will live in cities (UN 2002).
• About 32% of the world's urban population or nearly 1 billion people reside in slums or slum-like conditions. This number has increase 36% since 1990 and is expected to double by 2030 unless action is taken (UN-HABITAT 2003).
• In 1950, there were eight cities with populations over five million. In 1975, there were twenty-two. In 2000, there were forty-one. The number is expected to grow to fifty-nine cities by 2015 (UN-DESA 1999).

Transportation

• 40.6 million passenger vehicles rolled off the world's assembly lines in 2002, five times as many as in 1950. The total number of cars on the planet is expected to reach one billion by 2030 (Economist 1996; Renner 2003; Worldwatch 2004).
• Vehicles account for: 25% of world oil consumption; 30-50% of urban land use (roads, off-street parking etc.); 80-90% of nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons; and 90-95% of ambient carbon monoxide levels in some cities (During 1992; Renner 1988, WRI 1996).

Water Management & Recycling

• Municipal authorities routinely spend 20-30% of annual budgets on waste disposal and management, seventy percent of this can be attributed to transportation costs (UN-HABITAT 2001).
• Seventy percent of U.S. landfills will be full by 2025. In London (UK) and the surrounding region, landfills will run out of room by 2012 (Cetron and Davies 2005).

Energy

• Indoor smoke from cooking fires kills an estimated 500,000 people in India each year, mostly women and children (Cetron and Davies 2005).
• The world used 57 million barrels of oil per day in 1973. In 2002, it was 76 million. Consumption is expected to reach 110 million barrels daily by 2020 (UNEP 2005; Cetron and Davies 2005).
• Fossil fuels provide 90% of the world's energy supply (EIA 2004).
• The United States, with 5% of the world's population, consumes 30% of all oil consumed (Adam 2002).
• Energy consumption and carbon emissions from developing countries are expected to surpass consumption and emission levels in developed economies (EIA 2004).
• Energy demands account for up to 40% of the debt burden of developing countries (Pinderhughes 2004).

Food & Security

• To meet human nutritional needs over the next forty years, global agriculture will have to supply as much food as has been produced during all of human history (Cetron and Davies 2003).
• Since the late 1970s, an estimated six million hectares of agricultural land have been lost annually to desertification and severe soil degradation. (Speth 2002).
• Food wastes (including packaging) account for 1/3 of all solid waste in industrialized countries (Pinderhuges 2004).
• The food system causes 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions (Pirog 2001).
• In North America, food travels on average over 2,000 km from source of production to place of consumption (Roseland 2005).