Sustainability in Government Agencies
Provide infrastructure and security
Government is responsible for the planning, design and construction of our infrastructure, the framework that supports our society. Infrastructure comes in many forms. Urban planning, roads, public transportation, and utilities are all interdependent but housed in different agencies. The trick is to design them to optimize their collective effectiveness.
Ensure security
In the past, the US Defense Department used to be one of the worst polluters in the country. However, many in the military are proving that security can go hand in hand with sustainability. Lieutenant General Hill at the US Army Base in Fort Lewis, Washington recognized that in order to continue as a good neighbour in the community they needed to clean up their act. He set goals of zero net waste and an 85 per cent reduction in air emissions within 25 years. They have reduced the amount of hazardous materials used by 54 metric tons (from 2001 to 2004) and reduced their air emissions from 333 tons in 2000 to 175 tons in 2004. Their sustainability programme is projected to reduce their operating costs by over $1 million annually in direct cost savings and cost avoidance.
In designing logistics exercises, the Alaska National Guard decided to solve a realworld problem at the same time. They gathered up abandoned cars and unwanted appliances for recycling. The exercise provided skills in recon and logistics while contributing a valuable service to the Mat Su Valley. It’s important to look beyond the typical actors that provide security. What about energy, water and food? Berkeley, California is one of the first cities in the US to undertake an assessment of the security and sustainability of their food system. In 2001 their city council passed the Berkeley Food and Nutrition Policy, which provides a framework for moving them towards sustainable regional agriculture while fostering a local economy.
With the combined threat of biological weapons and the spread of disease from global warming and international travel, the Center for Disease Control may be an equally important player. Since ecological problems can cause mass migrations of people, destabilizing nearby countries, foreign policy and foreign aid also play a role. Security is
not just about getting the bad guys. It also has to be about preventing people from becoming so desperate they become bad guys. To that end, city, state and national climate strategies are part of security. International aid for family planning is part of security.
Renewable energy standards are part of security. Security is not just intelligence, border guards and Special Forces. Health, social services, energy, and environmental departments also play a role. Take this into account when you allocate funds.
Design efficient, vibrant urban spaces
In 1971 Curitiba, Brazil elected Jaime Lerner, an architect schooled in urban planning, to his first of three terms as mayor. Like many cities in developing countries, Curitiba has been subjected to an ‘invasion’ of people hoping for a better life. But Lerner did not want Curitiba to become like Sao Paulo and other large cities, inundated with traffic, pollution, crime and squalid favelas (shanty towns).
One of his insights was that cities usually expand from the centre out in all directions, like an inflating balloon, becoming increasingly dense and clogged. To avoid this, he and his colleagues hypothesized it would be better to define corridors of high-density development which could be efficiently served by public transit and other city services. While this layout looks odd from the air, with skyscrapers extending out like tentacles, it provides a number of benefits. In addition to providing efficient transportation, which we will describe in the next section, it also ensures that those in the high-density areas have easy access, visually and physically, to less dense areas including Curitiba’s many public parks.
Most of the parks were created to solve a problem. Curitiba’s eastern border is the Iguaçu River, which floods from Brazil’s tropical rains on a regular basis. Rather than using federal funding to build embankments, Lerner used the money to purchase the land along
the river for their largest park. In addition to recreation, it provides natural, cost-effective flood control. It also prevents development in an area that would otherwise cause human suffering and property losses from the inevitable flooding on a regular basis.
Sometimes disasters provide opportunities to correct past mistakes. Soldiers Grove in Wisconsin flooded repeatedly. The US Army Corps of Engineers looked into a technical solution – building embankments – but realized that just the upkeep on them would be twice the annual tax receipts. So instead of fighting nature, they moved the town, completing the work in 1983. It cost $1 million to move the town but that resulted in annual savings of $127,000, a reasonable rate of return. Furthermore, they used this opportunity to make radical improvements in energy efficiency. They passed new ordinances that specified tough thermal performance standards and required that at least 50 per cent of heating had to be served by solar systems. They passed a solar access ordinance so that new structures couldn’t block the sun for existing structures. As in Curitiba, the floodplain became a popular park.12 These examples should provide food for thought in the rebuilding of New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast. Instead of spending a fortune to fight nature, it is often wiser to work with it.
Design effective public transportation
The corridor-style urban design facilitates an incredibly efficient public transportation system. While Curitibans have a high rate of car ownership, most trips are by public transport, so much so that government does not have to subsidize the bus system. (In the US, it is typical for more than half the cost of a ride to be funded through tax subsidies.) Not having the funds for an expensive rail or underground system, Curitiba has pushed its bus system to carry the equivalent number of passengers at one-hundredth the cost of an underground rail system and 10 to 20 times cheaper than light rail. Their red express buses run along dedicated streets through the high-density corridors. During peak time, they arrive every 56 seconds. These special triple-reticulated buses with five oversized doors stop at the large plexiglass stations that passengers enter (known locally as tube stations), where the passengers have already paid their fares, and people in wheelchairs have already been elevated to floor level. The buses stop for 15 seconds to disgorge and load passengers out of different doors.
Green buses travel a loop around the city, so you don’t have to travel into the centre to get to a different barrio (district). Other colour-coded buses perform other functions, including one that zips across town, stopping infrequently, another that serves tourist destinations and a third for disabled people. Low-density areas are served by minivans so that they can maintain a service at least every 15 minutes, a benchmark they consider key to maintaining passenger levels. With only a few exceptions, the same fare works on all the lines. The government only manages the system; the buses are owned and operated by a host of different companies. Curitiba pays them based on kilometers travelled to maintain the frequent service.
This system has developed over time, using existing streets, by taking advantage of opportunities as they arose. They have not built expensive freeways that isolate neighborhoods. They haven’t had to waste precious downtown plots for parking structures. Those who do drive generally find few traffic jams. And everyone breathes easier for the lack of air pollution.
These innovations produce a higher quality of life. Based on a community survey, 99 per cent of Curitibans are happy with their town (compared to 70 percent of people in Sao Paulo, who think Curitibans have it better). They have a high per capita ratio of green space. They boast a 95 per cent literacy rate and 98 per cent of their children attend school. Their biggest problem seems to be an influx of poor people who have been encouraged to leave by surrounding communities that don’t want to fund social programmes for them. These benefits are just as relevant in richer nations. While Atlanta, Georgia and Portland, Oregon experienced similar population and income growth in the past decades, their experiences were vastly different. Portland has a good public transportation system and is encircled by an urban growth boundary intended to preserve agricultural and forested lands. In his book, The Eco-Economy, Lester Brown compares their experiences:
It’s clear from these figures that sustainability is also a livability issue. People in Portland spent less time in traffic jams, breathed cleaner air and saw their neighborhoods improve.
Don’t forget pedestrian-friendly and bike-friendly infrastructure. In 1992, Groningen, a Dutch city with a population of 170,000 dug up its city centre highways and made bicycle the main form of transport. Business has improved, rents increased and the flow of people out of the city has reversed. Local businesses that had fought this now are asking for more.
Protect the commons
Nature provides a host of services upon which we depend. Gretchen Daily of Stanford’s Center for Environmental Sciences and Policy provides the following list:
- Purification of air and water;
- Mitigation of droughts and floods;
- Generation and preservation of soils and renewal of their fertility;
- Detoxification and decomposition of wastes;
- Pollination of crops and natural vegetation;
- Dispersal of seeds;
- Cycling and movement of nutrients;
- Control of vast majority of potential agricultural pests;
- Maintenance of biodiversity;
- Protection of coastal shores from erosion by waves;
- Protection from sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays;
- Stabilization of the climate;
- Moderation of weather extremes and their impacts; and
- Provision of aesthetic beauty and intellectual stimulation that lift the human spirit.
To Daily’s list, we would add the production of food, fibre and fish – even with genetic engineering, we cannot make a tomato, tree or tilapia without nature’s help. While these services are provided for free, they are clearly not worthless! In fact, by some albeit controversial estimates published in an article by Robert Costanza in Nature Magazine, if we were to provide these same services through human engineering (where we could) it would cost more that the entire world’s gross national product!
When nature’s capacity to deliver these services is compromised, it can cost taxpayers dearly. New York City used to have such good quality water that it bottled it. After development and agricultural uses degraded the watershed, the city was faced with having to build a $8 billion water treatment facility. Fortunately, someone had the wisdom to ask first how much it would cost to restore the watershed, letting nature do the work. The answer was $1–2 billion. So in an experimental effort under the Environmental Protection Agency’s watchful eye, New York City is hoping to save not only three-quarters of the capital costs but also the $300 million per year to operate the plant.
Environmental problems can have direct human and economic impacts. A study conducted by the medical officer of health in Toronto showed that reducing vehicle emissions by 30 per cent could save nearly 200 lives and $1 billion in health costs. The morbidity costs add another $2.2 billion annually.
Bangkok, famous for its air pollution, has actually made great strides. Thai officials pressured oil companies to provide cleaner fuels and auto companies to improve their emissions, phased out two-stroke motorcycles, switched taxis to liquefied petroleum gas, and convinced crematoria to use electric incinerators. While motor vehicles have increased by 40 per cent over the last ten years, average levels of the most dangerous particulates, on average, now fall within the clean air standards used in the US.
You can be affected by actions outside your borders. For example, deforestation in China has caused massive sandstorms that have disrupted air traffic as far away as Korea and Japan. According to the World Health Organization, air pollution associated with industry and automobiles is killing more than 500,000 Asians each year. Pulses of pollution cross the Pacific and affect the Pacific Northwest. African dust storms are affecting coral in the Caribbean.
In the Western world, the most common way of protecting something is through private ownership. But by and large, no one owns these services and there is no market to manage their efficient distribution or use. These are public goods, the commons, services often not included in cost–benefit calculations. So we end up with ‘externalities’, impacts not accounted for by the companies that cause them, and perverse incentives that encourage the continuation of unsustainable practices Part of the challenge is to get a handle on what your impacts are. One method is the ecological footprint. Basically the inverse of carrying capacity, the ecological footprint quantifies the average amount of land needed per person to provide the resources and ecosystem services we use. To understand this concept, imagine someone placed a glass bubble over your city, not allowing anything in or out. You would quickly run out of certain resources (water, timber, food, etc.) and the wastes (organic waste, carbon dioxide, etc.) would begin to build up. So the ecological footprint of a city is actually much larger than its physical boundaries. The ecological footprint quantifies those flows using the number of acres per person as the measure. Santa Monica, California, used this model, along with The Natural Step framework, to quantify their improvements. They reduced their ecological footprint by 5.7 per cent in 1990–2000, requiring four fewer acres per person than the US average. Unfortunately, this still represents a lifestyle that is far beyond the Earth’s ability to provide if everyone alive enjoyed that same standard of living. Government is centre-stage in this drama. Progressive agencies are using a variety of regulatory and market-based solutions to protect the commons. One such example is Abotsford, British Columbia. As part of their land use planning, they protected areas of farmland from development through their Bill 42 Agricultural Land Reserve. In addition to preserving green space, it increased food security for their residents.
RESOURCES
Since climate is one of the commons that has received a great deal of attention, you may be interested in these resources:
– US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, www.usmayors.org/climateprotection/.
– C40 is a collection of the world’s largest cities working with the Clinton Climate Initiative, www.c40cities.org/
Other, broader resources include:
Costanza, Robert, et al (1997) ‘The Value of the World’s Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital’, Nature Magazine, May, pp202–209.
Redefining Progress (Ecological Footprint), www.rprogress.org
Ostrom et al (1999) ‘Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges’, Science, No 284, pp278–282.
