By Geoff Kendall | GreenBiz.com
Although cities occupy only 2 percent of the earth’s land surface, they account for more than 60 percent of energy consumption and 75 percent of carbon emissions. Over 3.5 billion people are city dwellers today, and by 2050 that number is projected to almost double. With figures like these, it’s not a stretch to say that our battle for a sustainable future will be won or lost in our cities.
So how do we win that battle? We started exploring this question with GreenBiz in the March event, Citystates: How Cities are Vital to the Future of Sustainability. In June I chaired a panel on the subject at the GreenBiz Convergence Paris conference. Joining me were two people with a lot of experience in this area, Peter Madden from Catapult Future Cities and Sterling Hughes from Silver Spring Networks.
What emerged from our discussion were the two big barriers to transforming our cities. Firstly, city governments are generally not structured in a way that enables joined-up decision making, so it’s hard for companies to sell city-wide solutions. Secondly, there is often not enough hard evidence concerning the cost benefit of particular solutions, so it’s hard for city governments to build a compelling business case for investing in them.
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