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As you all know, sustainability is a very important and a very necessary aspect of life, not only in our personal lives, but how our cities are run. This ranking does have a very thorough criteria, albeit I know there will be some nitpicking.
It is important that our cities become more sustainable and help mitigate climate change and extreme weather events.
2023 ranking (U.S and Canadian cities) and their grades, out of 70 cities globally. No surprises that Canadian cities, which have more policies and public support of sustainability initiatives, are ranked higher. What is surprising, is how Winnipeg is somehow the most sustainable in North America, according to this specific ranking.
1. Winnipeg: A
2. Vancouver: A
3. Halifax: A* (ranking document has Halifax as an A, website has it as a B..)
----------------------
4. Montreal: B
5. Toronto: B
6. Calgary: B
7. Ottawa: B
8: Edmonton: B
9. S.F: B
10. Boston: B
11. NYC: B
12. Minneapolis: B
13. London (Ontario): B
14. Washington D.C: B
15. L.A: B
16. Philly: B
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17. Seattle: C
18. Houston: C
19. Chicago: C
20. Saskatoon
I was expecting laughable results, but looking through the list in the link provided along with letter grades for various categories, I must say, I agree with it.
I think Winnipeg makes very little sense given its fairly high car dependency and the heating needs of the city which are also almost completely reliant on fossil fuels. It's not very dense or populous in itself or the surrounding region nor much industry so correspondingly probably doesn't emit much air pollutants and isn't in a valley or basin so it doesn't collect or have difficulty dispersing (such as with the Central Valley in California or Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania), and I think having local air pollutant being that high of an indicator as a sustainability composite score warps it a bit in a way I'm not sure jives well with what most people are referencing when they say sustainability.
As you all know, sustainability is a very important and a very necessary aspect of life, not only in our personal lives, but how our cities are run. This ranking does have a very thorough criteria, albeit I know there will be some nitpicking.
It is important that our cities become more sustainable and help mitigate climate change and extreme weather events.
2023 ranking (U.S and Canadian cities) and their grades, out of 70 cities globally. No surprises that Canadian cities, which have more policies and public support of sustainability initiatives, are ranked higher. What is surprising, is how Winnipeg is somehow the most sustainable in North America, according to this specific ranking.
1. Winnipeg: A
2. Vancouver: A
3. Halifax: A* (ranking document has Halifax as an A, website has it as a B..)
----------------------
4. Montreal: B
5. Toronto: B
6. Calgary: B
7. Ottawa: B
8: Edmonton: B
9. S.F: B
10. Boston: B
11. NYC: B
12. Minneapolis: B
13. London (Ontario): B
14. Washington D.C: B
15. L.A: B
16. Philly: B
---------------------------
17. Seattle: C
18. Houston: C
19. Chicago: C
20. Saskatoon
>> No surprises that Canadian cities, which have more policies and public support of sustainability initiativ
Not necessarily true. If the US had Canada's parliamentary system combined with its massive economy, you'd see a lot of the same if not more sustainability focused policies given the strong support for it in the States, after all the country passed the largest climate bill + clean tech industrial policy the world has ever seen.
I think Winnipeg makes very little sense given its fairly high car dependency and the heating needs of the city which are also almost completely reliant on fossil fuels. It's not very dense or populous in itself or the surrounding region nor much industry so correspondingly probably doesn't emit much air pollutants and isn't in a valley or basin so it doesn't collect or have difficulty dispersing (such as with the Central Valley in California or Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania), and I think having local air pollutant being that high of an indicator as a sustainability composite score warps it a bit in a way I'm not sure jives well with what most people are referencing when they say sustainability.
More than 98% of electricity generated in Manitoba comes from clean and renewable sources such as hydroelectricity and wind.
Right, but most heating in Manitoba is still done with fossil fuels and not electricity. There are incentives for geothermal and air sourced heat pumps that perform well in cold climates, but these are fairly recent and so the vast majority is still on natural gas. And it's still very much car dependent.
Not trying to poop on Winnipeg, just that I think it's ranked too high given those two factors and I think in the methodology it has to do with the very high weighting local air quality has which is not necessarily that closely tied to sustainability as it is to the economics of a place (how industrial it is) and its geography (whether it traps pollutants or normally gets a lot of dust or wildfires).
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 06-06-2023 at 11:44 AM..
Kind of laughable. Vancouver BC is almost exclusively a city that caters the rich. Easy to be “sustainable” when a large population of lower income folks can’t live in your city.
Can we have sustainable climate change with these cities? How is one able to sustain it? I have to say as a human species we are quite the conceited type, to somehow think we can threaten livability. I say all cities are doing pretty well! Even Phoenix and Las Vegas. I personally wouldn't want to live in Winnipeg, or any of those Canadian cities. Too cold for me for too long.
Kind of laughable. Vancouver BC is almost exclusively a city that caters the rich. Easy to be “sustainable” when a large population of lower income folks can’t live in your city.
I'm not sure if that's particularly closely related. Do you think Winnipeg is even wealthier then? Or Halifax just a tiny bit less so?
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