2030 Districts: High Performance Building Districts Leveraging Public-Private Partnerships
Our cities can be the cornerstone of the green circular economy, supporting resilient societies and inclusive communities with universal access to public services and economic opportunity. The WBCSD’s cornerstone Vision 2050 report calls for laying out a pathway to a...Foundations Shaping the Future of Our Cities
Nine billion people living well within the limits of the planet by mid-century. That is the simple but powerful “Vision 2050” that the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, or WBCSD, has for the future of humanity. Rampant growth and dwindling resources...
The UN Global Compact Cities Program for Sustainable Cities
The UN Global Compact is a strategic policy initiative for businesses that are committed to aligning their operations and strategies with ten universally accepted principles in the areas of human rights, labor, environment and anti-corruption. By doing so, business,...
Innovative Finance Models for Sustainable Cities of the Future
City budget deficits are far from rare. San Jose, Chicago, Phoenix and Las Vegas are just a few examples of cities confronting likely shortfalls in the upcoming fiscal year. A wave of cost-cutting, and in many cases conflicting, policy drivers awaits the...
The Informal Economy: An Invisible Engine of Sustainable Development
This blog post is a response to the Meeting of the Minds & Living Cities group blogging event which asks, “How could cities better connect all their residents to economic opportunity?” What is the Informal Economy? The informal economy refers to...
Envisioning Smart Cities through Sustainable Infrastructure
Smart Cities take years of planning and innovative thinking and the approach varies depending on each cities stage of development, location, culture, demographics, and funding. According to research conducted by Alcatel-Lucent – there are three main motivators for...
Sustainable Growth in North Texas: Vision North Texas
Eight of the 15 fastest-growing large U.S. cities and towns for the year ending July 1, 2012 were in Texas, according to population estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau. The Lone Star State also stood out in terms of the size of population growth, with five of...
Sustainable Supply Chain Management
Peter Senge, the founder of the Society for Organizational Learning, a faculty member at MIT Sloan School of Management, and the author of The Fifth Discipline and says “To make progress on environmental issues, organizations must first understand that they’re part of...
Redefining Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to Account for Sustainability
In 2010, Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff published a study “Growth in a Time of Debt” that became one of the most famous, most talked about economics papers since the financial crisis. In an era of economic recession, it answered a basic question everybody was...
Energy Challenges in Texas- Can Demand Response Program Rescue the Lone Star State?
The U.S. economy has had little to celebrate since the 2008 financial meltdown and the recession that followed. One bright spot in the gloomy picture, however, is Texas. The rest of the nation could turn to the Lone Star State as a model for dynamic growth, as a close...
Microfinancing: Alleviating Poverty Sustainably
Paul Hawken, in the book Ecology of Commerce, wrote: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor and you aren’t...