Posts Tagged ‘governance’
Tax Resources, Not Labour – New tax system enabling sustainability?
Posted in Models, Research by Rob Eales on January 14th, 2011
via No Tech Magazine
Image by suttonhoo via flickr under this Creative Commons licence
“In our society, high taxes on labor drive businesses to minimize the number of employees. Resources remain untaxed, so we use them unconstrained. This system causes both unemployment and scarcity of resources.”
This post from the No Tech Magazine links to the site Value Extracted Tax which discusses changes to the current taxation paradigm in order to enable sustainability to be build into the taxation regime.
Visit No Tech Magazine and Value Extracted Tax
10 Actions by Mexico City to Address Climate Change
Posted in Events, Movements by Kate Archdeacon on November 22nd, 2010
Sustainable Cities Net: Posting from the UCLG Congress in Mexico City 18-25 November
The City of Mexico launched their publication “10 Actions to Address Climate Change” here at the Dome on Friday night, with the assistance of a range of guest speakers including Pedro Miranda, Head of Siemens One. Siemens have sponsored the publication, which outlines programs the City has implemented over the past 4 years to reduce GHG emissions. These actions include:
- Transport Corridors / Zero Emissions Transport Corridor
- ECOBICI Individual Transport System
- Minibus and Taxis Replacement Program
- Metro Line 12
- Sustainable Housing Program
- Solar Energy Use Regulations
- Mexico City Goverment Enviromental Management System
- Green Roofs Program
- Recovery of the Rivers Magdalena and Eslava
- Restoration of Ecosystems and Compensation for Maintaining Environmental Services
Download the publication in Spanish and English. We had the opportunity to ask Pedro Miranda some questions after the presentation, and the videos will be hosted at http://www.youtube.com/siemens
Based on our time here over the past week, the ECOBICI appears to be well-established, and there’s a Ciclovia here in the city on Sundays – people were being “fitted” for bicycles as we travelled to the World Mayors Climate Summit early this morning.
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Sustainable Cities Net: posting from Mexico City
Posted in Events, Movements by Kate Archdeacon on November 18th, 2010
Centro Historico, photo: K Archdeacon
On behalf of Sustainable Cities Net, I (Kate) am attending and blogging on the United Cities and Local Governments Congress and the World Mayors’ Summit, held this week in Mexico City. The content will appear here and also on a site created by Siemens, who provided a similar service at COP 15 and will do so at COP 16 next month. Over three thousand delegates from around the world will attend the presentations from city mayors on the pressures and responses they meet in their own city. The opportunity to expand the discussion and learn about pressures, models, scales, successes and failures in other cities is unique, and the material from Sustainable Cities Net and Sustainable Melbourne will make its way into my perspective and reports. Bloggers from other countries will be there too, so keep an eye on all the sites for a diversity of opinion!
About the Congress & Summit:
The UCLG Congress – The Local and Regional Leaders World Summit – is organised every 3 years and it brings together over 3000 local and regional elected representatives and practitioners from around the world.
Since its creation in Paris in 2004, United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) has worked to make the voice of mayors and local and regional officials heard, in order to guarantee that cities and regions take their rightful place in the international community. The cities and regions, including their inhabitants, that we work for, are being faced with stark challenges from global phenomena and events that demand individual and collective action from local authorities, such as: climate change, shared sustainable development, financial crises, dialogue between cultures.
The Local and Regional Leaders World Summit, November 18 – 21 in Mexico City, which will bring together mayors, presidents of regions, local elected officials and their partners, will be an unprecedented occasion for exchange and debate on the role of local governments in development and in the efforts for greater between citizens and also between cities and regions.
The World Mayors Summit on Climate (WMSC) will be held on November 21, 2010 in Mexico City, so that mayors from different regions of the world can sign a voluntary Pact (the Global Cities Covenant on Climate “the Mexico City Pact”) that sends a clear message to the international community on the strategic importance of cities in the struggle against climate change.
http://www.uclgcongress.com/
(UCLG English programme, Spanish programme, French programme,)
http://www.wmsc2010.org/
(Programmes on the site)
To follow the posts from the Summit follow or bookmark this link, http://www.sustainablecitiesnet.com/tag/mexico-city/.
We will be posting regular Sustainable Cities content as well, so keep adding your articles and photos!
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A world class revolution in the making? Sydney’s clean energy plan.
Posted in Sustainable Cities, Visions by Rob Eales on November 1st, 2010
Source: The Fifth Estate
Image: pierre pouliquin via flickr CC license
From Sydney’s clean energy plan could be a world class revolution in the making by Boris Kelly
A packed house at Sydney Town Hall on Monday 25 October heard Alan Jones, chief development officer, Energy and Climate Change for the City of Sydney, declare his aim to transform Sydney into a carbon free city reliant on 100 per cent renewable energy, in a plan that has been lauded as potentially one of the world’s “great revolutions”.
The purpose of the event, part of the City Talk series, was to update the community on progress of Sydney City Council’s 2030 Sustainable Sydney plan.
The plan has set a target of reducing carbon emissions by 70 per cent by 2030, but Jones went further, suggesting that with the addition of bio-gas to power the City’s proposed trigeneration plants, the magic 100 per cent could potentially be achieved.
In his introduction to the event, leading climate scientist Tim Flannery called the City’s master plan “one of the great revolutions that we are seeing around the world.” In a video recorded interview Flannery told the audience: “You won’t know Sydney in 10 years time. The sources of energy will be utterly transformed and this is being done by the City of Sydney because there is no other organisation that can do it. The City has access to the land and the services.”
Read the rest at The Fifth Estate
The Environmentalist’s Paradox: Research Paper
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on October 20th, 2010
Source: Stockholm Resilience Centre
For some time, ecologists have shown that the Earth’s life support systems are declining. However simultaneously, human wealth, health, education, and life span is increasing.
The paradox not an illusion
In a new paper centre researchers Garry Peterson and Maria Tengö together with collaborators from McGill University untangled these potential explanations of Environmentalist´s Paradox. The authors present four hypotheses to why human well-being is increasing while ecosystem services degrade:
1. Human well-being is actually declining because current ways to measure this are wrong or incomplete.
2. Food production and continued agricultural growth trumps all other ecosystems because only provisioning services are important for human well-being.
3. Technology makes human less dependent on ecosystem services
4. The worst is yet to come: there is a time lag after ecosystem service degradation before human well-being is affected.
As for the first hypothesis, Peterson and colleagues argue that there is a large body of evidence demonstrating that human wellbeing, even of the worst off, has increased during the past fifty years, suggesting that the paradox is not an illusion.
Mixed support for the other hypotheses
Their assessment of the second hypothesis is that agricultural ecosystems strongly support human wellbeing. However, support for hypotheses three and four is mixed. Despite great advances in technology and social organization that have increased the benefits people get from nature, we have increased rather than decreased our use of ecosystems.
There is little evidence from the past of sustained decreases in human wellbeing caused by environmental decline, but as the scope of human use of the planet has increased there are reasons to remain concerned about the future, says co-author Maria Tengö.
There is evidence that regulating ecosystem services that maintain stable environments for people are decreasing locally, while we are also pushing the entire earth system across its planetary boundaries.
These findings do not show that the environment is unimportant but rather that people are extremely innovative and adaptive. However, the careless destruction of ecological infrastructure is leaving people worse off than they would be if we made more thoughtful investments in ecological infrastructure. We have a lot of understanding of how humanity alters the biosphere, but little understanding of how these changes impact us, says Garry Peterson.
Time to invest in ecological infrastructure
The authors argue that humanity is under-investing in ecological infrastructure, and suggest three areas: agriculture, cities, and infrastructure, where increased management, research, and governance to enhance ecosystem services could yield major gains in human wellbeing.
Major reasons for this lack of investment are disciplinary boundaries among researchers and inadequate attention to environmental governance.
Researchers often address narrow aspects of global environmental change, based upon disciplinary assumptions that are often unconvincing to researchers outside their own discipline. We need research that addresses practical questions beyond disciplinary focus as well as increased theoretical and practical attention to environmental governance, say Peterson and Tengö.
References
Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne, Garry D. Peterson, Maria Tengö, Elena M. Bennett, Tim Holland, Karina Benessaiah, Graham K. MacDonald and Laura Pfeifer 2010 Untangling the Environmentalist’s Paradox: Why is Human Well-Being Increasing as Ecosystem Services Degrade? BioScience 60(8):576-589. doi: 10.1525/bio.2010.60.8.4
The environmentalist’s paradox
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Toronto City Hall: Green Roof Showcase
Posted in Movements by Kate Archdeacon on September 28th, 2010
Source: MetropolisMag
Last year Toronto became the first North American city to make green roofs law. All new residential, commercial, and institutional buildings larger than 21,500 square feet are now required to plant at least a portion of their roofs. (Industrial structures must follow suit next year.) But the city didn’t stop at just setting the rules. It has also created a vibrant case study: a 118,000-square-foot public roof garden atop the podium building of city hall.
“The city has really been pushing the green side of construction and wanted to lead by example,” says Bruce Bowes, Toronto’s chief corporate officer. “A number of projects have been undertaken at city hall. One is the roof podium. Others include hooking up to a deep-lake water-cooling system and adding building-automation systems.” The green roof, which makes the building more energy efficient and helps with storm-water management, is the first phase of a revitalization project for Nathan Phillips Square, a broad plaza in front of city hall that is Toronto’s largest public square.
Read the full article by Tim McKeough for Metropolis.
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Fit Cities: Design & Policy Collaboration
Posted in Models, Movements by Kate Archdeacon on September 7th, 2010
Source: MetropolisMag
From “Design + Policy = Fit Cities” by Susan Szenasy:
George Miller, the current president of the American Institute of Architects and a local [NY] practitioner, opened the fifth annual Fit City symposium at the Center for Architecture, in Manhattan, by challenging the crowd to rethink the planning, architecture, and design of our metropolis, with the goal of encouraging physical activity and healthy lifestyles. Our city is in the midst of a health emergency: 43 percent of elementary school children are overweight or obese, and diabetes rates are climbing, driving health-care costs up and life expectancies down. Clearly, a shift in mind-set is needed. “Ninety percent of the game is half mental,” Miller quipped, channeling Yogi Berra, master of the malaprop. That morning in May foretold an era of collaboration between policy makers and the creative community. Fit City 5, a partnership between the local AIA chapter and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, attracted stakeholders from public health, education, and design as well as other concerned citizens.
Collaborative Democracy
Posted in Research, Visions by Kate Archdeacon on September 3rd, 2010
Source: Worldchanging.com
Image: infomatique from flickr CC
This article is from a remixed talk by Beth Noveck’s on “Transparent Government“. The talk was given as part of the Long Now Foundation‘s Seminars about Long-Term Thinking. The talks were remixed by Hassan Masum, are made available under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.5 license.
The talk describes a social experiment “which seized upon the truth that each of us is an expert in something” that was designed to investigate ways of re-energising democratic decision making. It started from the following point,
We have been concentrating decision-making power in the hands of too few people – whether legislatures, or cabinet officials, or bureaucrats and agencies like the patent office. We construct our institutional practices around the notion that this is the best way that we have to make decisions. Even though we do not have a system of monarchy or aristocracy, we still believe in the notion of political expertise, and the notion that we have to rest power at the center.
What exacerbates this problem is that we are making long-term decisions that affect the fate of our planet. The fate of our economy, and of major systems of health care and education and environment, are being decided by people who are in short-term political positions. We have a disconnect between the long-term effect of what we do, and short-term electoral cycles.
We have to look at the ways we can reengineer our institutions to take advantage of the expertise that comes from outside the center, and bring it into the way that we make decisions.
Read the full article on Worldchanging
Criminalising Environmental Destruction: Ecocide
Posted in Movements, Opinion by Kate Archdeacon on August 17th, 2010
Source: The Ecologist
From “Ecocide: making environmental destruction a criminal offence” by David Hawkins:
Lawyer Polly Higgins is spearheading a campaign to have ‘ecocide’ recognised by the UN as an international crime against peace. But how will this work in practice?
Ecocide has always been a moral crime, but British lawyer Polly Higgins sees it differently: ‘until it is legally a crime it’s not going to be thought of as wrong. Banks are willing to put our money – public money – into some of the most destructive practices on the planet because they see nothing wrong with it.’ Higgins is leading a new campaign to have ecocide recognised by the United Nations as an international crime against peace. She defines ecocide as ‘the extensive destruction, damage to or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been severely diminished.’ With population growth and climate change, ecocide is increasingly likely to lead to resource wars. Hence, Higgins argues, it is a potential crime against peace and requires international action because of its capacity to be, in legalese, ‘trans-boundary and multi-jurisdictional’.
Among current examples of ecocide are the Alberta tar sands, Amazonian logging, oceanic plastic pollution, damage from oil extraction in the Niger Delta, the Bingham Canyon copper mine in Utah and so on, along with more dispersed problems such as polluted waters, which Higgins claims ‘account for the death of more people than all forms of violence including war’. Ecocide is now going on all over the world on an unprecedented scale. Luckily, she says, many of the tools needed to prosecute such cases are already in existence. ‘The International Criminal Court (ICC) was formed in 2002 to prosecute individuals for breaches of four Crimes Against Peace. They are: Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, War Crimes and Crimes of Aggression.’ A case can begin from something as small as a letter from a community or individual.
If ecocide laws are passed by the UN there will be many ramifications. The complementarity principle means that ‘once something is put in as an international law, then each member state should put in their own national law to comply with it’. The ICC will step in if there is an inability or failure (individual countries may not want to challenge their extractive industries) to implement legislation on a national level. ‘This sends a strong message that you can’t lobby your way out of the situation,’ says Higgins. As well as the legal machinery, Higgins points to existing information-gathering networks in the form of NGOs, many of which are specialised to study and campaign on specific ecosystems. Working together they will be able to present comprehensive damage reports. Read the rest of this entry »
Zero Carbon Britain 2030: Report
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on June 22nd, 2010
zerocarbonbritain2030 provides political and economic solutions to the urgent challenges raised by the climate science, outlining how we can transform the UK into an efficient, clean, prosperous zero-carbon society. Covering energy, transport, land use, the built environment and industry, each chapter of the report has been written by bringing together the UK’s leading thinkers in their field including policy makers, scientists, academics, industry and NGOs.
zerocarbonbritain2030 is a fully integrated solution to climate change. It examines how we can meet our electricity and heating requirements through efficient service provision, while still decreasing carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other emissions.
The report starts by examining the current “Context” in the Climate Science and Energy Security chapters. It then moves on to how we can “PowerDown” heat and electricity demand largely through new technology, efficient design and behaviour change. The “Land Use & Agriculture” section considers the tremendous potential of the land not only to decrease emissions but also to sequester residual emissions. We then move on to how we can “PowerUp” through the use of renewable technology. Finally we examine the policy that can help bring this about and the job creation that will come with it, in the “Framework, policy and economics” section.
A full copy of the new report is available as a free pdf , or buy a printed copy from the Centre for Alternative Technology.
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