What makes a city green? Which are the greenest cities?

Gil: It's a good question, and a timely one, given that leadership -- at least in the U.S. -- has shifted from national government to local, and given that at least half a dozen cities (including my own home of Berkeley, Calif.) are claiming or seeking the mantle of Greenest Town In All The Land.

It's a complicated question, too, since so many factors go into the equation. SustainLane, which released the first U.S. green city ratings in June 2005, based on "city quality of life combined with indicators of sustainability programs, policies and performance," considers 12 factors, including Transportation, Air Quality, Tap Water Quality, LEED Building, Food & Agriculture, Zoning, Land Use, Solid Waste Diversion Rate, Planning, City Innovation, Energy/Climate, and Knowledge Base,

SustainLane ranks San Francisco at the top, closely followed by Portland. Berkeley (a city we've worked with for years) and Seattle hold third and fourth positions. New York gained a surprisingly high seventh place, buoyed by strong public transportation, intrinsic energy efficiency and great water quality. Houston brings up the rear of this "top 25" list; no surprise, perhaps -- though the bottom ranking did reportedly motivate Houston's leadership to get into the game!

Notably absent from the SustainLane criteria: the rest of the "triple bottom line" -- economic development and environmental justice -- criteria that are of cities like Berkeley and Los Angeles have deemed an essential part of their sustainability programs.

The Green Guide offers its own top-ten list, ranking based on "good water- and air-quality, efficient use of resources, renewable energy leadership, accessible and reliable public transportation, and green building practices. We also looked for parks and greenbelts and access to locally-grown fresh food through farmers' markets and community supported agriculture groups. Finally, we included affordability in our green criteria, since the health benefits, public parks, and other amenities of living in a greener city need to be available to more than just the wealthy." Their list -- "listed alphabetically and... not ranked among themselves" -- includes Austin, Texas; Boulder, Colo.; Chicago, Ill.; Honolulu, Hawaii; Madison, Wis.; Minneapolis, Minn.; Oakland, Calif.; Portland, Ore.; San Francisco, Calif.; Seattle, Wash; plenty of overlap with SustainLane's list (which was limited to large cities).

The challenge for any ranking system of course is the criteria. What do you include? How do you compare apples and oranges? How to you assign relative weights to disparate factors? These are the same challenges we're grappling with in developing the Sustainable Business Rating System (SBRS) -- along with the challenge of striking the appropriate balance between "sufficiently comprehensive" and "not too complex." (We think we've found a way to handle that, with unprecedented transparency. We'll have more news as it develops.)

Perhaps more important than rankings, though, are the number of cities that are stepping up to the bar. For example, 208 cities (as of Feb. 27, 2006) have signed on to the U.S. Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement, anchored by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels -- pledging to "meet or beat the Kyoto Protocol targets in their own communities." Outside the U.S., the list is too long to list, and the activities to diverse to rank: hundreds of communities in Sweden have worked with The Natural Step, and have signed on the U.N. Global Compact; Curaitiba, Brazil, has pioneered in public transportation, recycling and literacy (and connected them!); BedZed in England is developing "zero footprint" communities. The list is long. And that's good news.


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Gil Friend, systems ecologist and business strategist, is president and CEO of Natural Logic, Inc. -- offering advisory services and tools that help companies and communities prosper by embedding the laws of nature at the heart of enterprise. Sign up online to receive his monthly column via email. Read Gil's blog here.