Sustainable Cities - What's Working and Why

Metro21 attended the Heinz College hosted event Sustainable Cities: What’s Working and Why, an installment of the How Ideas Become Policy: Getting Stuff Done speaker series hosted by Ambassador Sarah Mendelson, Distinguished Service Professor of Public Policy and Head of Heinz College in Washington, DC on September 29, 2021.

Featured speaker at this event was Anthony Pippa, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Sustainable Development.

• Advancing sustainable goals in practice is often achieved on a local, rather than national, level. That is because on a local level the value of sustainability is more visible, as it aligns with other goals for improving local communities (for example, improving diversity, equity, and inclusion).
• By studying cities that are addressing sustainability “in an evidence-based way,” it is possible to create a template for solving these problems on a global scale.
• In the US in particular, the cultural distaste for allowing global initiatives to drive local decision making has led many cities to underplay the fact that their work is directly linked to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
• European and Asian cities, on the other hand, are far more likely to tie their work into the global SDGs, partly because their national governments have made strong commitments to them as well.
• Without broader federal adoption of the SDGs, US cities will likely fall behind their G20 peers in addressing sustainability issues.
• Because transportation decisions are so critical for advancing sustainable development and so much of transportation policy is driven by the federal government, US cities will be limited in their ability to make the type of large-scale changes necessary to fully implement the SDGs.

Watch the full discussion here.