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?

About Philip Monaghan
Philip Monaghan is a
writer, strategist, and change manager in the fields of economic development
and environmental sustainability.

He is the acclaimed author
of the books Sustainability in Austerity
(2010) and Hard to Make, Hard to Break
(out February 2012).