Unlocking Cities' Sustainable Potentials

More than 50 percent of the world's population today lives in cities. Cities and human settlements are often focal points of climate change issues, health problems, poverty or inequality. At the same time, cities hold significant potential to achieve economic, environmental and social sustainability.

The capacity to access cities' sustainability potential lies in their residents and the diversity and knowledge they represent. Any technology, policy, regulation or grass-root solution toward sustainability only succeeds if there are people who can and want to implement those. As such, the real opportunity in creating sustainable communities lies in the activation and constant development of people's capacity to identify, understand, accept and act on sustainability initiatives.

Capacity building starts with education. However, education remains a service that not everyone on this planet has equal access to (SDG 4). Additionally, sustainability has not yet reached all classrooms as a mandatory or integrated teaching subject.

A different way of capacity building that does not only apply to students but practitioners and citizens of all generations and professions alike is the concept of facilitated, collaborative-knowledge creation and transfer. Knowledge transfer describes the process of transferring expertise, knowledge, skills and capabilities from an individual, team or institution to another individual, team or institution that is in need of that knowledge. Participants in this transfer not only benefit from learning from each other but from the opportunity to collaboratively learn and innovate when applying those learnings to their local context.

At Sustainable Cities International (SCI), we see cities as acting urban laboratories of knowledge creation and transfer. For more than two decades, SCI has been facilitating knowledge transfer among cities internationally on sustainability initiatives through city networks and peer exchanges.

The most recent knowledge transfer initiative is the SCI Energy Lab, a peer-learning program designed to create capacity for innovation in the development and implementation of sustainable-energy initiatives. This three-year pilot program involves eight cities from seven countries in North America, Europe and Africa. Through this program, city staff from engineering, planning and sustainability departments have been sharing a variety of approaches to accelerate actions on energy efficiency and renewable energy in their communities and neighborhoods, such as:

• Communication and marketing strategies for energy-efficiency incentives,

• Financing opportunities for public-energy projects,

• Planning and permitting policies to integrate sustainable-energy options into existing and future infrastructure projects, and

• Promotion of waste to energy projects to city council.

Another project that SCI has been leading in the past and is now supporting through its affiliation with the Simon Fraser University is the Canadian International Youth Internship Program (IYIP). This program places young professionals from Canada into local governments in developing countries to contribute to local capacity building around sustainable-economic development. At the same time, it provides interns with professional international-work experience related to their areas of interest. In the past decade, SCI has provided placements for more than 90 internships. In Durban, South Africa, for example, interns have supported the Ethekwini Municipal Institute of Learning (MILE) since its inception in 2009. MILE offers municipal training, capacity building and learning exchanges on environmental, economic and social sustainability practices across Africa.

There are numerous other initiatives that specifically target peer learning among cities that have achieved considerable commitment and leadership toward more sustainable communities. Some of these initiatives include the C40 network, the Urban Sustainability Directors Network, the WWF Earth Hour City Challenge, or the Europe based organization Energy Cities -- host and convener of the Covenant of Mayors, a unique platform and network for mayors who officially and beyond their elected terms commit to the implementation of sustainability targets within their local governments.

Ultimately, much of the path towards sustainability must be learned and experienced in order for adaptation and change to occur. The more cities undertake this journey, the more others will be able to learn from them and leapfrog ahead.