Jakarta is far from being classified as a green city.
On 16 February 2005, an international agreement on how to tackle climate change, the Kyoto Protocol, was ratified by over 140 countries. At that time, the mayor of Seattle, Greg Nickels, decided to promote the aspirations of the Kyoto Protocol in Seattle. He also encouraged other cities in the United States to follow suit by urging those in positions of leadership to consider adopting the principles of the Kyoto Protocol through the Climate Protection Agreement and creating green cities.
By June 2005, 141 mayors had signed on. By early 2009, the agreement had been signed by 935 mayors, in cities with a combined population of 83 million.
Today, many city mayors are working to get their cities focused on the environment. Though trying to achieve green city status, leaders are acting to improve the quality of the air, lower the use of non-renewable resources, encourage the building of green homes, offices, and other structures, create more green spaces, support environmentally friendly methods of transportation, and offer recycling programs.
The United Arab Emirates and China are two vastly different countries. But several years from now, they will have one thing in common — they both will have the first green cities in the world. Yes, China and the United Arab Emirates are currently preparing cities that have everything human beings could ever dream of such as clean air and clean water.
China is a country know for being polluted. No visitor returns without remarking on it. Car headlights gleam through the smog.
In April 2007, the government twice issued its most severe Air Pollution Index rating, which advises that the aged and ill should stay indoors.
This condition has been going on for a very long time, until the government embarked on a bold, expensive experiment to see whether pollution and waste – of all forms, not just the kind that taints the air – can be drastically reduced or even eliminated.
In March 2007, the government broke ground on what it called the world’s first eco-city. Designed by the London-based global consulting firm Arup Group, Dongtan is to be built on an island that is just a ferry ride away from central Shanghai. The government expects that by the time of the Expo, the new enclave would be a showcase city of 8,000 and it would have 1 million residents by 2050.
Dongtan will ban all polluting cars, even the most advanced hybrids. It will dig canals for waterways. On its streets, people will get around using electric cars, bicycles or just their legs.
The city would recycle as much as possible, including all its wastewater, grow food on its own environmentally-sensitive farms, and create all its own energy in non-polluting ways — wind, solar, and the burning of human and animal waste.
Most of these technologies are not new, and many are commonly used in Western Europe, Asia or the United States. What will make Dongtan unique is the integration of environmentally friendly practices and the strict exclusion of older, polluting ones.
If it is unusual for a business deal to be witnessed by the heads of two of the world’s most powerful nations, so too is the idea of creating from scratch an eco-city as large as Manhattan and more populous than Edinburgh or Atlanta.
But building cities virtually overnight is nothing new for the Chinese. In 1980, the central government created a special economic zone for Shenzhen, at the time a small fishing village about an hour from Hong Kong. These days, it’s a sprawling metropolis of 9 million.
While China will have Dongtan, the United Arab Emirates will have its own green city which will be named Masdar City. It is a city which is designed to have no carbon emissions, cars, or waste. It will cost $22 billion and take eight years to build. It will be able to hold a population of 50,000 people and 1,500 businesses. The city will cover 1,483 acres. Masdar City is being designed by Foster and Partners, a British company.
The city will have a personal electrical power supply mainly from two renewable energy sources — wind turbines and solar panels. Water will be provided through a solar-powered desalination plant and air conditioning will be provided naturally from wind towers.
It is forecast to save more than $2 billion in oil costs over the next 25 years along with creating more than 70,000 jobs.
The immense project will be supported by a company created for it called “Masdar Initiative”, which will develop and commercialize clean energy technologies. It will also be supported by the World Wildlife Fund, a global conservation charity, and it is hoped that international joint ventures will bring in more money.
Both Dongtan and Masdar are currently still undergoing development and we won’t see the results for at least 8 years. So, are we saying that we can only start having green cities many years from now? Is there any chance that we could start today?
A sustainability ranking of 30 major European cities was released in December 2009 in Copenhagen, the Scandinavian city that besides hosting the recent United Nations climate change talks, has been ranked in first place in the new European Green City Index.
The study, sponsored by Siemens and developed by The Economist Intelligence Unit, ranked 30 major cities across Europe relative to one another in eight categories with 30 underlying qualitative and quantitative indicators.
The top cities are, in order — Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, Vienna and Amsterdam.
Don’t think that this ranking is of the “Greenest Cities” in Europe, even though it’s called the European Green City Index. Such an assumption is made by many about city sustainability indexes.
Some of our biggest challenges in cutting carbon to reduce global climate change will be in understanding the system dynamics that cities and other complex entities such as corporations, neighborhoods or even our households comprise. We no longer have the luxury of viewing our energy sources, food, water, buildings and land as separate, unrelated systems, even if business, government and academic institutions have been formulated according to this silo-type way of thinking.
Now that we have seen examples and pictures of how a green city can actually be realized, it leave us with a question — “what has your government done to make your city green?”
