An Infographic Breakdown Of The World’s Greenest Cities
London, New York, Vancouver, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Stockholm: Which city gets the title?
It’s hard to quantify what makes a city “greener” than any other metropolis, but there are some clues: car ownership, green space, bicycle usage, solar installations, recycling, and water consumption are just some of the factors that add up to create environmentally responsible cities. An infographic from HouseTrip lays out what different cities are doing in an easy-to-read format.
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So which city is the greenest?
It’s hard to say. In many respects, Stockholm beats the competition. But the cities need to be considered in their regional contexts. New York is environmentally conscious compared to most other U.S. cities, and Vancouver is known as one of the greenest cities in Canada. All of the cities listed have features that should be emulated by other cities. As the world’s population becomes more urban, these models of what can be done will become increasingly important.
We got destroyed in transportation, water, and waste! Ouch!
Vancouverites consume over 500 litres of water per day? Damn! That’s almost an hour-long shower every day for every person!
Is water consumption in a temperate rain forest zone which has plenty of water to spare really something that should be considered as not being “green”…?
We get a lot of rain, but limited water storage capacity. Rainfall and snowmelt can’t be collected in the summertime, and reservoir levels can become a concern then.
It takes a lot of energy to pump water and sewage. Increased water use also leads to higher volumes of sewage which is expensive an uses energy to treat.
In most homes and offices in Canada, hot water for “domestic” uses is the second-largest energy usage after space heating. Finding ways to use less energy is usually considered very green thinking.
Keep in mind in transportation there is an error in the chart: Vancouver has a 42 per cent non-car share in transportation to work. The article made a correction at the top.
That said, I’m shocked at how terribly Vancouverites do when it comes to waste. Why do we produce so much more than even New Yorkers? I can’t think of a reasonable explanation for this or why that level of garbage hasn’t received more attention from government and environmental campaigners.
These types of analyses are not useful without a consistent definition of city or urban area. Just using city limits is not helpful. In this case, it looks like Vancouver’s share of the metropolitan population is much smaller than London or New York’s.
@yvrlutyens Great point. Jarrett Walker has previously written about this problem of arbitrary “metropolitan area” boundaries in his post here: http://www.humantransit.org/2011/05/great-american-metro-areas.html
Perhaps 93 percent of the people of Stockholm walk, cycle or take public transport to work when you only take into account the CBD and adjacent areas, but like Vancouver, Stocholm has a lot of boring ol’ suburbs. It’s hard to draw a line on where the city ends and the suburbs start and if we just use the political boundaries, that’s arbitrary for global comparisons
Spot on. Vancouver, Stockholm and Amsterdam are all pretty close in metropolitan population but the population cited for Vancouver is just the City and much lower than the other two so it’s clear Vancouver derives an unfair advantage – and our suburbs are likely a lot less green than those of some of the other cities.
Here’s an easy way to reduce water consumption, picked it up after watching a program on one of Australia large cities and how they give people a timer for while in the shower that tells them when 4min is up, it’s plenty of time to get clean. Since I don’t have the timer, I use my alarm clocks snooze button, crawl out of bed, put coffee pot on, feed the cat and jump int the shower, When I hear the alarm go off again I have to jump out of the shower to silence it, works great and it’s free.