While Copenhagen tackles carbon neutrality, Toronto bickers over bike lanes. How did Nordic cities get so far ahead?
Canadian cities have been making serious plans for the sustainable management of their ongoing growth. Corporate Knights Sustainable Cities ranking put Vancouver, Victoria and Toronto ahead of the rest in Canada but with a top grade of only 71%, there's still a long way for our cities to go.
If we look across the Atlantic to cities in the Nordic countries, we'll find a lot more than reindeer and the Ikea headquarters. As a region, these countries have a lot in common with Canada--a comparable population size, high levels of education, similar climate, and a similar concern for the environment--but their cities are ahead of us in many areas of sustainable planning, including green transportation, green building, and emissions reductions.
Why are we behind our Nordic counterparts? And what can we learn from them? In this podcast, Corporate Knights reporter Julia Barnes speaks to municipal representatives from Helsinki, Reykjavik, and Stockholm, as well as Toronto's Chief Planner Gary Wright and Evergreen's Executive Director Geoff Cape about the factors that can hold us back or propel us forward.
The interviews in this podcast were conducted at the CanNord conference held in Toronto on March 23, 2011 and organized by the Nordic Innovation Centre, the Swedish Trade Council, Innovation Norway, the Danish Trade Council, and Nordic Energy Research.
Music in this podcast includes See you later and Hidden Blues by Pitx, Reverie by _ghost, and Relief by Gurdonark.
