Facing the Environmental Challenge
Urban
regions are the world's dominant population centers and the main growth engines
of the global economy. For effective governance, citizenship, urban planning,
and economic strategy in metropolitan areas, every level of government and the
private and civic sectors must collaborate across jurisdictional boundaries.
Public policy and urban management today generally do not correspond to the
reality of metropolitan regions as fundamental units of market activity, social
interaction, culture, transportation systems, land-use planning, and
environmental protection. Many people across the globe are now economic
"citizens" of metropolitan regions, but in most cases they are politically
disenfranchised within these dynamic and rapidly growing urban agglomerations.
Even stable public institutions are increasingly unable to cope with the vast
array of problems confronting the entire urban region, and metropolitan
residents are generally disconnected at the regional level from governmental
decision-making, democratic participation, and citizenship rights and
responsibilities. Global Urban Development directly addresses this 21st century
challenge by developing cooperative partnerships among the public, private, and
civic sectors in urban regions. These partnerships design and implement
metropolitan economic strategies to generate increased prosperity; metropolitan
land-use and transportation strategies to invest in infrastructure, manage
growth, and enhance the urban environment; and metropolitan community
development strategies that promote livable neighborhoods with improved
housing, education, health, safety, and quality of life. Through effective and
inclusive metropolitan strategic partnerships, urban regions can become more
economically productive, technologically innovative, socially equitable, and
environmentally sustainable.
This GUD committee
recently completed a major action-oriented research project funded by the Mistra Foundation (the Government of Sweden’s Foundation
for Strategic Environmental Research).
The project identified the key issues, challenges, institutional
capacity, innovative policies, best practices, and other major trends related
to successfully improving the future of environmentally and economically
sustainable urban development throughout the world, including climate change
and additional vital environmental concerns.
Global Urban Development was deeply involved in this collaborative
effort. Henrik
Nolmark served as the overall project coordinator,
Marc Weiss and Nola-Kate Seymoar as the coordinators
for the US and Canada, Belinda Yuen as the coordinator for Asia, and Wendy Sarkissian as the coordinator for Australia, New Zealand,
and the Pacific Islands. Members of the
committee on Facing the Environmental Challenge along
with other members of GUD’s global network were involved in this project on the
global future of sustainable urban development.
In
addition, the committee completed a second project which was a spin-off from
the Mistra Foundation research. This project involved working with the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund to organize a meeting on “The Economic Benefits of
Climate Action” held at
Currently GUD and its program committee on Facing the Environmental Challenge are actively working to
coordinate the Climate Prosperity
Alliance, including Sustainable
Economic Development Strategies, and Climate
Prosperity Media/Arts. Global Urban
Development has received grants from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the
Environmental Defense Fund to support Climate Prosperity. This project is a direct outgrowth of the Pocantico Hills meeting on The Economic Benefits of Climate
Action. It includes the Global Climate Prosperity Agreement in
partnership with the United Nations, the Global
Climate Prosperity Scoreboard in partnership with Ethical Markets Media,
and the Global Coal Transition and Cleantech Investment Initiative in partnership with the
Carbon War Room. It also involves the
GUD publication in July 2010 of Climate
Prosperity: A Framework for Sustainable Economic
Development Strategies, by James Nixon and Marc Weiss, and the
publication by the International Economic Development Council (IEDC) in July
2009 of the Climate Prosperity Handbook.
In addition, GUD leaders have worked with several places engaged in
Sustainable Economic Development Strategies, including Silicon Valley
(California); the State of Delaware; San Antonio (Texas), Metropolitan Portland
(Oregon/Washington); Southwest Florida; and Metropolitan Denver
(Colorado). Many more places will be
initiating Climate Prosperity Strategies during 2011, including Curitiba,
Brazil. On November 5, 2008 at the United Nations World Urban Forum in Nanjing,
China, GUD and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund sponsored a Networking
Event/Habitat Seminar on “Climate Prosperity: Sustainable Economic and
Community Development.” On February
20-21, 2009, GUD organized a national Climate Prosperity strategic leadership
conference in San Jose, CA, in conjunction with the public launch event for the
Silicon Valley Climate Prosperity Strategy.
Marc Weiss is
serving as Chair of the Climate Prosperity Alliance. Several GUD staff members,
including Jobeda Ali, Elizabeth Autumn, Emilia Queiroga Barros, Lawrence Bloom, John Cleveland, Aser Cortines, Rachel Fleishman,
Nicky Gavron, Peter Hall, Rafal
Hejne, Jaime Lerner, Christine Loh,
Tony Manwaring, Dan Montgomery, James Nixon, Bill Radulovich, Louise Rubacky,
Nathan Sandwick, Nancy Sedmak-Weiss,
Ivy Simmons, Al Victors, Ramiro Wahrhaftig, and
Cynthia Wilson are working on this important initiative.
Facing the
Environmental Challenge Committee
Co-Chairs: Habiba Al Marashi, Mary Jane Ortega, and Tom Roper
Grace Akumu
Rosa Alegria
Abdulrahman Al Ghabban
Jobeda Ali
Michael Arwas
Barbara Askins
Rob Atkinson
Uri Avin
Mart Bailey
Emilia Queiroga Barros
Andrea Bassi
Scott Bernstein
Vinayak Bharne
Olzod Bhum-Yalagch
Lawrence Bloom
Scott Brook
Lester Brown
David Burwell
Peter Calthorpe
Tim Campbell
Michael Chang
Don Chen
John Cleveland
Victor Cohen
Rick Cole
Thais Corral
Naomi Davis
Dianne
Dillon-Ridgley
Hank Dittmar
Michael Donovan
Petr Dostal
James Duncan
Will Duggan
Reese Fayde
Seth Fearey
Bruce Ferguson
Morel Fourman
Robert Freling
Sharon Friel
Alastair Galpin
Yaakov Garb
James Garrison
Nicky Gavron
Laurie Geller
David Gershon
Santosh Ghosh
Ernesto Gil
Herbert Girardet
Brendan Gleeson
Peter Hall
Hazel Henderson
Elliott Hoffman
Walter Hook
Curtis Johnson
Calestous Juma
Daniel Kammen
Allen Kearns
Michael Kennedy
C. S. Kiang
Jeroen Klink
Robert Lang
Keith Laughlin
Christopher Leinberger
Jaime Lerner
Mark Levin
Richard Lindberg
Christine Loh
Rodrigo Loures
L. Hunter Lovins
Adalberto Maluf
Azim Manji
Tony Manwaring
Tom McCawley
Stephanie McClellan
Miguel Mendonca
Jiang Mingjun
Ricardo Montezuma
Dan Montgomery
Elizabeth Moule
James Nixon
Henrik Nolmark
Geoffrey Nwaka
Cornelia Hahn Oberlander
H. Peter Oberlander
Haixiao Pan
Julia Parzen
Michael Peck
Neal Peirce
Morgan Pillay
Scott Polikov
Shelley Poticha
Deependra Prashad
Craig Raborn
Bill Radulovich
Michael Replogle
Renato Romano
Maria Rosario
Catherine Ross
Kendra Sandoval
Nathan Sandwick
Wendy Sarkissian
David Satterthwaite
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber
Igor Semenov
Nola-Kate Seymoar
Jigar Shah
Molly O’Meara
Sheehan
Gholam Shiran
Daniel Solomon
Jeffrey Soule
John Spears
W. Cecil Steward
Richard Swett
Ludek Sykora
Kaarin Taipale
Sein-Way Tan
Sophia Trapp
Martin Tull
Al Victors
Ramiro Wahrhaftig
Jessica Wasserman
Michael Wegener
Lisa Van Well
Marc Weiss
Dave Wetzel
Gina Whitehill-Baziuk
Michelle Wyman
Robert Yaro
Nicholas You
Sun Younian
Belinda Yuen
Dimitri Zenghelis