Toward Sustainable Communities

Solutions for Citizens and Their Governments

Mark Roseland

• Publisher: New Society Publishers
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780865717114
• eBook ISBN: 9781550925067
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Corporate Governance
• Index: Business

The single most useful resource out there on how to build and grow sustainable places

The need to make our communities sustainable is more urgent than ever before. Toward Sustainable Communities remains the single most useful resource for creating vibrant, healthy, equitable, economically viable places. This comprehensive update of the classic text presents a leading-edge overview of sustainability in a new fully illustrated, full-color format.

Compelling new case studies and expanded treatment of sustainability in rural as well as urban settings are complemented by contributions from a range of experts around the world, demonstrating how "community capital" can be leveraged to meet the needs of cities and towns for:

• Energy efficiency, waste reduction, and recycling
• Water, sewage, transportation, and housing
• Climate change and air quality
• Land use and urban planning.

Fully supported by a complete suite of online resources and tools, Toward Sustainable Communities is packed with concrete, innovative solutions to a host of municipal challenges. Required reading for policymakers, educators, social enterprises, and engaged citizens, this "living book" will appeal to anyone concerned about community sustainability and a livable future.

Mark Roseland is director of the Centre for Sustainable Community Development at Simon Fraser University and professor at SFU's School of Resource and Environmental Management. He lectures internationally, advises communities and governments on sustainable development policy and planning, and has been cited as one of British Columbia's "top fifty living public intellectuals."

Part 1

Sustainable Communities, Sustainable Planet

Part 1 explores the meaning of sustainable development and its implications for communities, and develops a community capital framework for addressing sustainable community development. It concludes with a chapter on thinking strategically, which examines policy instruments for sustainable community development. These instruments provide the organizational structure for the tools and initiatives in the chapters of part 2.

Chapter 1 The Context for Sustainable Communities

In communities in North America and around the world, citizens and their governments are embracing sustainability, not as an afterthought tacked onto official community plans, but as a new way of thinking about their future. Motivations vary, but include a desire to secure the means to survival, improve the quality of community life, protect the environment and make inclusive and participatory decisions. As well, they reflect concern about our fellow citizens’ well-being, longing for a sense of satisfaction that money can’t buy and pride in the legacy we leave for the future. Together, they have created a movement that is inevitable and unstoppable.

As this book demonstrates, this movement toward sustainability is no guarantee that we will achieve sustainability; several indicators show that we are losing ground and that the outcome is certainly not inevitable. However, sustainability can deliver on these hopes. It promises to help us create communities that are cleaner, healthier and less expensive; enjoy greater accessibility and cohesion; and be more self-reliant and secure in energy, food and economic resources. Sustainable communities are not merely about “sustaining” the quality of our lives — they are about improving it.

This chapter introduces the context for sustainable communities, starting with an examination of the global context, concept and history of sustainable development. From there we explore the concept of community capital as a framework for making sustainable development real in our communities. This community capital framework binds together the many topics presented in this book into a cohesive whole, and underlies all the subsequent chapters. The chapter culminates by explaining that this book is not about stopping development; rather, it is about doing development differently. Finally, it concludes with an outline of the subsequent chapters.

Thinking Globally

On October 31, 2011, the human population reached 7 billion. The United Nations projects that global population will peak at 9.3 billion in 2050 (UNFPA 2011). Our growing numbers will challenge all nations in terms of food production, the availability of land for human use and the ecological integrity of the land left undeveloped. Scholars have long warned us about the possible implications. Almost 200 years ago, English economist Thomas Malthus argued that all populations will succumb to famine and disease as a result of unabated growth. In their 1972 classic Limits to Growth, Meadows et al. pointed out that while populations grew exponentially, the technology to increase the availability of resources only grows linearly. More recently, Diamond (2005) demonstrated that population pressures in combination with fragile ecosystems and myopic political institutions have led many civilizations to collapse.

One-Planet Living

By Jennie Moore

One-planet living is living within the means of nature. Specifically, it refers to a lifestyle that does not demand more ecological goods and services (i.e., biocapacity or natural capital) than the Earth’s ecosystems can sustain on a global annual basis. A more precise term is one-Earth living since there are many planets, but only one Earth that is capable of supporting life as we know it. One-planet or one-Earth living relies on the ecological footprint (footprintnetwork.org) to measure how much global average biocapacity is required to supply the resources and to assimilate the wastes associated with a given population’s average lifestyle. The World Wide Fund for Nature (2010) has calculated that for the global population to live sustainably within the ecological carrying capacity of Earth, the share of average biologically productive land and water that could be utilized by each individual is less than two hectares. In reality, however, there is extreme inequity in the distribution of Earth’s resources. For example, if everyone lived the way that an average North American does, close to eight global hectares per capita, we would need at least four and half Earth-like planets (WWF et al. 2010). If everyone lived the way that an average African does, at just over one global hectare per capita, we could live sustainably on our one and only Earth (WWF et al. 2010).

Various initiatives are underway to explore what one-planet living entails in different places around the world. Perhaps the most famous example is the Beddington Zero Energy Development (BedZed) that follows the One Planet Living framework developed by BioRegional, a not-for-profit social enterprise (bioregional.com). Situated near London, England, some residents at BedZed are demonstrating that changes in lifestyle, particularly to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, can bring one-planet living within reach.

People around the world are starting to consider that the population problem in the South is less significant a problem than over-consumption and wasted resources in the North. The impact on our environment is affected not only by the population, but by the level of consumption or affluence and the technology available. Resource consumption varies greatly across all countries and income levels: in 2005, 76.6 percent of the world’s resources were consumed by the wealthiest 20 percent of the global population, and the poorest 20 percent consumed just 1.5 percent of the resources (World Bank 2008). The effect on the environment of this wealthiest fifth is similarly disproportionate: it contributed 40 percent of the global carbon emissions in 2006 (World Watch Institute 2008). Viewed through the lens of per capita resource consumption, the population question takes on new dimensions: a woman in India would need to have ten children to match the resources consumed by one American child (WWF et al. 2010).

Bringing the developing nations up to North American living standards would require a five-to ten-fold increase in world industrial output (WCED 1987), yet the contingent combination of depleted resource stocks (e.g., fossil fuels, fisheries, forests) with degraded life-support systems (e.g., ozone depletion, global warming, acid rain) demonstrates the impossibility of the entire world consuming and polluting at the rate of North Americans. This challenge may be beyond nature’s capacity, and therefore, beyond our capability (World Watch Institute 2011).

Ecological Footprint

One way to consider human impact on natural resources and ecosystems is to consider our ecological footprint: the land area and related natural capital on which we draw to sustain our population and production structure (Wackernagel and Rees 1996; WWF et al. 2010).

Natural capital refers to any stock of natural assets that yields a flow of valuable goods and services into the future. Natural capital includes non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels and minerals, renewable resources that can provide goods and services (such as food, clean water and energy) in perpetuity if managed sustainably, and the capacity of natural systems to continue providing critical goods and services while absorbing our pollutants and emissions (such as the atmosphere’s capacity to regulate the planet’s climate).

The ecological footprint tool that Wackernagel and Rees developed compares human demand for resources to the renewable resources available on Earth. It estimates the global hectares (gha) required for human demand by adding up all of the area required to provide these renewable resources, the area of built infrastructure, and the area needed to absorb waste. Although the tool cannot measure everything, its most recent iteration measured crops, fish, timber, grass for livestock and carbon dioxide emissions. The Earth’s biocapacity, which represents the renewable resources available for consumption, is also measured in global hectares that represent an average of bioproductive capacity for all land types (WWF et al. 2010).

Citizens of the United States and Canada have ecological footprints that are among the world’s top ten: while the global average is just 3 gha, they consume about 8 and 7 gha per capita annually (WWF et al. 2010). The United Arab Emirates and Qatar top the list with 10 gha per person.

Scholars also estimate that, in the 1970s, humanity entered a state known as ecological overshoot (WWF et al. 2010): that is, we began producing more resources than ecosystems can regenerate. The WWF’s Living Planet Report (2010) calculated that it would take 1.5 years to regenerate the resources used in 2007 alone. How is this possible? These numbers were calculated looking at the newly regenerated portion of the resource, which is conceived of as resource interest. When our use exceeds this interest, we are drawing down our natural capital and entering a state of overshoot; in ecological footprint terms, we are then appropriating carrying capacity from “distant elsewheres” (Wackernagel & Rees 1996).

And there is the reality of climate change. Humans are producing far more greenhouse gases than our ecosystems can absorb. In fact, the increase in carbon emissions alone is one of the largest changes in the composition of our footprint since it was calculated by Living Planet Report in 1998. In just one decade, carbon emissions, as a portion of the ecological footprint, have increased by 35 percent. Today they account for more than half of the global ecological footprint (WWF et al. 2010).

Ecological footprint analysis confirms that we need to minimize consumption of essential natural capital. But how do we do this in the face of such daunting challenges while maintaining or improving quality of life? The answer, of course, is in planning for development that is sustainable.

Sustainable Development

In December 1983, in response to a United Nations General Assembly resolution, the UN Secretary-General appointed Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway to chair the independent World Commission on Environment and Development. In April 1987, the Commission released its much-heralded report, Our Common Future. The Brundtland Report (as it is often known) showed that the poorest fifth of the world’s population has less than 2 percent of the world’s economic product while the richest fifth has 75 percent; and that the 26 percent of the world’s population living in developed countries consumes between 80 and 86 percent of non-renewable resources and 34 percent to 53 percent of food products (WCED 1987). The report emphasized the principle and imperative of sustainable development, which it defined as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” and endowed the concept that had been refined for years with new political credibility.

There are many ways to define sustainability. The simplest definition is: A sustainable society is one that can persist over generations, one that is farseeing enough, flexible enough, and wise enough not to undermine either its physical or its social systems of support.

— Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows
and Jorgen Randers, Beyond the Limits (1992)

The term sustainable development has been criticized as ambiguous and open to contradictory interpretations. Confusion results when it is conflated with sustainable growth, an oxymoron as nothing physical can grow indefinitely. While increases in population, production and size are aptly described as growth, qualitative changes, such as improvements in health care, knowledge, quality of life, walkability, density and efficient resource use, are more accurately described as “development.”

Sustainable development has a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface to the Fourth Edition
• Foreword
• How This Book Is Organized
• Part 1: Sustainable Communities, Sustainable Planet
• Part 2: Sustainable Community Building Blocks
• Part 3: Mobilizing Citizens and Their Governments
• Appendix: Pando | Sustainable Communities
• References
• Index
• Contributors
• About the Author