Please read the new article posted under “Links to Weekly Readings” and post your responses to the two questions by 5:00 PM Tuesday, April 5.
ECON2505 Env Econ, SP2016 Wed. D728
A City Tech OpenLab Course Site
Please read the new article posted under “Links to Weekly Readings” and post your responses to the two questions by 5:00 PM Tuesday, April 5.
The OpenLab is an open-source, digital platform designed to support teaching and learning at City Tech (New York City College of Technology), and to promote student and faculty engagement in the intellectual and social life of the college community.
The authors created a new metric, the urban sustainability index, for evaluating success in emerging-market cities, which are already achieved sustainable development â economic growth, but that improves lives without exhausting the environment or other resources. They identified five common themes for achieving sustainability in emerging-market cities: industrial restructuring linked to land renewal, âgreenâ urban planning, transparent standards and charges, integrated large-scale recycling, and cross-departmental coordination. Based on it and the result of analyzing the policies and programs of some of Chinaâs best-performing cities, they create a five-part index. This index is designed to measure the performance of cities in five sustainability categories: how well they are meeting their citizensâ basic needs, resource efficiency, environmental cleanliness, built environment, and commitment to future sustainability.
As basic needs, the authors suggest use such indicators as an access to safe water, sufficient living space, adequate health care, and education are fundamental priorities for urban populations. As resource efficiency, they use a cityâs efficiency in such areas as the use of water and energy and the effective recycling of waste directly correlates to the quality of life of its citizens. As environmental cleanliness, they use air and industrial pollution, wastewater treatment, and waste management.
For example, it can be achievable to forcing the smokestack industries are moving from the city center into some parts of rural area, to buy state-of-the-art technology and emissions-control equipment. Other way to do it, to force to close many small, inefficient power plants and create or renovate one more effective and power plant.
By Elliot Raskin
1)Describe what the urban sustainability index proposes to do.
The urban sustainability index aims to measure the development of emerging cities through the lens of sustainability. To this end, it takes stock of;
The city’s ability to meet the needs of it’s citizens,
The city’s resource efficiency,
The city’s environmental cleanliness,
The city’s build environment, and
The city’s commitment to future sustainable endeavors.
2)Describe three components of this index and comment on whether you view this as achievable.
The basic needs part of the index is a simple analysis of how well the city provides water, housing, health, and education. This is fairly easy to determine based on complaints and self-reporting of the agencies that provide them.
The environmental cleanliness section of the index is a measurement of the city’s air, industrial, and water pollution, as well as waste management. Air pollution is easy enough to measure, though difficult to enforce. Industrial, water, and solid waste management are more difficult to oversee.
The most difficult index to enforce and measure is the commitment to future sustainability. This is determined by the amount of green jobs, and the level of investment in environmental protection. This means that the city has to mandate a certain level of environmental jobs and measure the impact per capita. However mandating that work be done to this end doesn’t mean that the sustainability of the city will actually improve, since all goals are in the future.
1 Describe what the urban sustainability index proposes to do.
The urban sustainability index is proposed to be an analytical tool that measures sustainable development in cities in emerging markets. The index contains a comprehensive five part definitions outlining various sustainable categories.
Describe three components of this index and comment on whether you view this as achievable.
2
Resource Efficiency
Built environment
Commitment to future sustainability
In my opinion all three of these factors can be attained if industries and people become awar of the fact that certain actions taken can affect the environment around them. With this ecological awareness, and innovative designs by engineers urban planners, and Architects, cities and industries alike can readily adapt these sustainable designs.
1)describe what the urban sustainability index proposal to do.
The urban sustainability index proposal includes citizen”s basic needs,resource efficiency, environmental cleanliness, built environment, and commitment to future sustainability.
2)Describe three components of this index and comment on whether you view this a’s achievable.
I believe basic needs, built environment, resource efficency is not achievable. Basic needs can’t be accomplished for everyone anytime soon. Built environment is becoming less and less possible as more land is used to build houses or buildings. 100% resource efficency can’t be accomplished since not everyone will use water and energy effectively on recycling of waste.
1. The urban sustainability index proposes to measure development sustainability in cities by checking how the city meets the needs of its citizens, its resource efficiency, how clean its environment is, built environment and the cities commitment to future sustainability.
2. The resource efficiency, Cleanliness of the environment, and cities commitment to future sustainability, I believe some of them are achievable while others will take a while to even try to achieve. For the resource efficiency that would be hard to fulfill that achievement because its peoples nature to naturally waste what they have a lot of even if they know they risk running out of that resource if they continue to do the same thing. For the cleanliness of the environment it is possible to achieve but it will be very hard because even when people know the consequence of just throwing trash on the floor they still do it without regard to their fellow humans and their environment, the only way to achieve this will be by placing a consequence against people who donât dispose of garbage in the rightly manner. The cities commitment to future sustainability will be one of the hard goals to achieve because to achieve that the city has to monitor any and everything that could cause danger to the city which alone makes it hard to achieve.
The urban sustainability index proposes to create a new metric to help policy makers evaluate the success in emerging markets by evaluating the environmental sustainability of cities and officials’ commitment to handling their growing urban populations. The index measure the performance of cities in five sustainability categories: how well they are meeting the basic needs of their citizens, the efficiency of the available resources, the cleanliness of the environment, built environment and commitment to future sustainability.
Basic needs measures water access rate, available living space, available doctors per capita and student to teacher ratio in primary schools. I feel these indicators are vital to any self sustaining economy and must be exceeded in markets that wish to expand. These indicators can be easy measured by each cities’ government officials and can be isolated over time to measure the cities performance as they introduce and implement new technologies to help support their sustainability models. I feel that it is more important that these resources are not only available but of a high quality to avoid contamination and the issues similar to the water crisis in Flint. Resource efficiency is measured through electricity consumption, water consumption, the ratio of industry waste that’s recycled and utilized and percentage of GDP from heavy industry. The obvious next step is observing how the resources already available is being used. Heavy industry GDP, electricity and water consumption is easily measured and the long term goal for sustainability models should be to lower this consumption over time. Recycling industry waste into other industries and businesses will help to lower overall waste. I do believe they can take this a step further and measure exact when and how the waste is reused. Built environment is measured by population density in urban areas, passengers that use public transportation, available public green space and building heating and cooling efficiency. The first three can be measured through the use of national and local census and information from local transportation companies. Building efficiency can be found through building records. In New York City I do feel the last indicators would present a problem since so many buildings are old and not be able to be held up to the standards they were recorded to have when they were first built.
1. The urban sustainability index is proposed to identify and measure the city’s success in implementing sustainable practices in different aspects of development. The urban sustainability index measure how well the city able to provide citizensâ basic needs, resource efficiency, environmental cleanliness, built environment, and commitment to future sustainability.
2. The component of the the urban sustainability index: Basic Citizen’s Needs
The citizen’s basic needs component describes how well the city provides necessary resources for well-being as water, heat, food, transportation, housing, healthcare, education system, etc. The data of performance is collected based on complaints from the private citizens ,self-reporting of the agencies that provide resources or quality control reports from the city’s agencies. I think with the correlation to the human factor the measure of this component is possible and achievable.
The component of the the urban sustainability index:The Environmental Cleanliness
This component of the index is a measurement of the cityâs air quality, water pollution, waste management,presence of radioactive and toxic elements in it’s resources etc. The data can be collected by city’s environmental quality controlling agencies through the lab analysis of water, air or any other object of interest. I believe with the help of modern technologies the measurement of this component is achievable.
The component of the the urban sustainability index: Commitment To Future Sustainability
The Commitment to Future Sustainability components measures the plans of the city for future development in a sustainable way. It investigates the city’s programs for recycling, green jobs, waste management, energy consumption reduction etc. This is the most vexed question whether the measure of the commitment to future sustainability can be accurate. From one side, all the plans firstly appear on the paper and due to economical or political instability the wonderful and promising sustainability development plans may be left there and never implemented in the real life. From another side, any green project or program needs the plan to have a chance for funding and development. Whether it will be implemented in the real life or not depends on community involvement and support from the citizens themselves. I think the commitment to future sustainability component is necessary in measurement the city’s overall urban sustainability index, but it is hard to measure it correctly.
Describe what the urban sustainability index proposes to do.
The urban sustainability index is tool proposed to be used to measure and examine the environmental sustainability in various cities by evaluating the city’s commitment to Eco-friendly practices that will help developing urban areas. This includes how they manage and allocate their resources etc.
Describe three components of this index and comment on whether you view this as achievable.
Three components are the following:
1. Environmental cleanliness, to ensure prevention of diseases and harmful pollutants. Without supervision, the people will be exposed to harmful waste thus making it a liability and should be a priority to maintain clean urban areas.
2. Basic needs, such as food water shelter, via its most efficient way. There are water filtration systems in place as well as local food programs to reduce food waste and provide temporary housing for those that are impoverished and going through some tough times.
3. Resource allocation and efficiency. We do not want to waste precious resources recklessly so a city must focus a great deal for providing adequate water distribution as well as conservation methods for water and energy since cities tend to emit many pollutants into the air.
Urban sustainability index is designed to measure the performance of cities on a common set of sustainability categories. Due to rapid development and lack of measurements of sustainability it is difficult to compare data from emerging cities. Therefore urban sustainability index was designed to simplify the process of comparison across countries. It consists of five categories that compare sustainability on basic needs, resource efficiency, environmental cleanliness, built environment, commitment to future sustainability.
Basic needs component refers to cityâs ability to supply its residents with water, housing, health, and education. The data for this category is fairly easy accessible, therefore measuring sustainability using this category is achievable. Most likely this data is already being collected by city governments and wouldnât require additional resources.
Resource efficiency consists of data on electricity and water consumption, ration of industrial waste recycle and utilization, and percentage of GDP from heavy industry. While majority of these components should be available, it might be difficult to measure waste recycling. Developing countries do not always have well-functioning waste programs which leads to waste dumping, therefore it might create a challenge in measuring.
The most challenging part of the index is the commitment to future sustainability. Developing cities often face many challenges such as lack of funding, tight budgets, approaching deadlines, economical design. Thus creating green jobs and investing in environmental protection can be overlooked.
1. urban sustainability is use to measure out performances of cites of the environment to the Eco Friendly. It also contains a 5 part definition.
2. The most used need for the environment is water, housing, health, and transportation and education. What out these thing the city or environment would not be a good sign to live off on. It feels as if this city would go down hill if we don’t have this
1. urban sustainability is use to measure out performances of cites of the environment to the Eco Friendly. It also contains a 5 part definition.
2. The most used need for the environment is water, housing, health, and transportation and education. What out these thing the city or environment would not be a good sign to live off on. It feels as if this city would go down hill if we don’t have this
1. urban sustainability is use to measure out performances of cites of the environment to the Eco Friendly. It also contains a 5 part definition.
2. The most used need for the environment is water, housing, health, and transportation and education. What out these thing the city or environment would not be a good sign to live off on. It feels as if this city would go down hill if we don’t have this