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My name’s Sue Riddlestone, from BioRegional and I’m also a London Sustainable Development
Commissioner and at BioRegional we’ve been using a framework called One Planet Living,
which has a set of indicators and obviously an aim of achieving a sustainable ecological
footprint for everybody and sustainable living wherever you live in the world and at the
London Sustainable Development Commission working on quality of life indicators, which
are the mayor’s way of seeing every two years how are we getting on in London. I think
sustainability has been very much on the agenda over the last ten years especially with climate
change and the need to come up with a new agreement on Kyoto and the pressing need for
sustainable development for many poorer people as well and I think in a way the global recession
has made people think more about the economy and what do we mean by a green economy? And
in some ways you could say that’s a shame, because we’re not thinking about achieving
our goals and targets, but I think perhaps for a long time the economic aspect, which
is the third pillar of sustainability as people say hasn’t been considered enough and hasn’t
been integrated into the environmental and the social so well. So I think that’s a
welcome step forward and it will be great if ecocity indicators paid as much attention
to that as they did to the social and environmental aspects. I think the key challenges in terms
of making our cities and urban areas more sustainable are with growing pressure on resources
and rising energy prices, rising food prices and more and more people moving to the city.
How are the cities going to function effectively? Can you imagine if there’s no fuel, if there’s
no food what would happen? So I think the key challenge now is to make our cities and
urban areas resilient to these external factors by just being more efficient. Across the EU,
in fact across the world we waste so much food just in the transportation systems or
the storage systems and we’re just wasting energy in inefficient homes and inefficient
vehicles. So if we can just be more resource efficient I think that’s a key issue to
tackle and it’ll really help to sort of future proof us in a world with growing population.
I think when you’re developing indicators you need to know that it’s going to be relatively
easy to measure the data and that that data will be comparable. So actually when we did
our first set of monitoring at BedZED there was a set of questions that we asked and it’s
important to ask the same questions the next time and the next time and just to sort of
see the trend. So it’s quite important to at least standardise some of the figures and
the types of questions that are asked so that you can compare with other urban areas or
other cities. Our mayor in London he wants London to be a world class exemplary green
city, but how do we know if it is or not unless we could compare it to other cities? I think
it is important perhaps to standardise some key top line indicators, but also to allow
plenty of flexibility for people to pick and choose what they want to do, what’s important
to their own locality, but at the same time if those questions or ways of measuring are
made available so that people can choose a more standard question from a big smorgasbord
of questions then perhaps that would allow at least for some comparison even if not everywhere
is the same. Having just been involved in the Rio+20 Earth Summit and the United Nations
I have seen how much and how much it says in that document, each area must decide for
itself. So I think they do seem happy to agree that there are some standard things which
must be counted or must be taken into consideration, seeing what nation states say and cities say,
but I think everybody does want to do it their way. It’s just become clearer and clearer
to me how political realities can mitigate against measuring and standards and indicators,
because politicians are elected for just a few years and they don’t want to be judged
and that seemed to come out in quite a few of the discussions that we had, because this
could be bad for their chances to be re-elected, but at the same time they like to make bold
statements and many mayors have really played a leading role. So I just realised what a
fine line it is to tread when you’re a pioneering leader of a city or a municipality. I’ve
seen for myself how much you can really make a difference at a citywide level, at a regional
level and we’ve all seen how nations can fail to agree, whereas local leaders can get
on and do something. So I think whatever we can all do all of these people that have come
here to Bellagio to talk about this, whatever we can do when we go back to where we are
to support them in that I think that’s what we need to do.