An amicable divorce – Unleashing the power of public money

The cold hard truth, as we know, is that the mismanagement and over-consumption of natural resources is unsustainable.

According to UNEP’s International Resource Panel (IRP), we need to decouple human well-being from resource consumption by linking local or national development strategies to resource flow strategies. Their analysis concludes that by 2050 the level of resources used by each person each year will need to fall to between five and six tonnes in order for us to live within our environmental limits. IRP also points out that rapid urbanization combined with technological and systematic innovation offer an historic opportunity to reduce our ‘metabolic rate’.

To put the importance of the role of urbanization in context, one only has to look at the economic power of cities compared to companies or countries. As is evident from this extract of
the world’s top 100 economies from 2008 by the World Bank, cities matter because they are large economies in their own right. For instance, the city of Tokyo accounts for half of all of Japan’s national economic power and is nearly 6 times larger than its biggest company Toyota Motor.

So, how can city leaders decouple development from carbon? And especially so in an age of financial austerity with local budget spending cut by 10 per cent and 28 per cent in the United States and the United Kingdom, respectively, for example? One route in addition to  looking at planning frameworks is public procurement policy. Take for instance the huge carbon footprint of the UK government’s £220 billion supply chain – accounting for 77 per cent of total greenhouse emissions, with £42 billion spent through local authorities (i.e., goods and services, construction and roads, waste, social care, etc.).

Getting a better handle on which suppliers are more or less carbon-intensive is good for local governments in many ways. As well as increasing economic resiliency by weaning municipalities off fossil fuel-dependent key suppliers, it potentially reduces operating costs and stimulates local green economy trade, too. This is a concept some cities are already advancing, indeed are coming together through communities of practice to do so.

Decoupling development from carbon in this way is surely an amicable divorce, then?

Philip Monaghan

Philip Monaghan is the founder and CEO of Infrangilis, a think-tank focused on resilient and sustainable development, and also an internationally recognised writer and strategist on economic development and environmental sustainability. He has worked with government councils, the European Commission, and the UN on resilience, sustainability, and community development issues. He is the author of ‘How Local Resilience Creates Sustainable Societies and Sustainability in Austerity’ and brings long experience in connecting ideas about local resilience and global sustainability to real-world practice.