Eco-Municipalities take seed from Canada to Kenya

How on earth should we begin greening our metropolises? By asking the right questions, says The Natural Step.

Dave Cieslewicz, the Mayor of Madison, state capital of Wisconsin, US, has a favourite ‘nuts and bolts’ story about sustainability. We could start by asking the right questions.

“We have this huge converted factory, where we store all our 240 buses overnight,” he explains. “There’s a small part of the building where we fuel them up – and, for the comfort of our employees, we’d been keeping that warm.”

What the council hadn’t registered was that they were unnecessarily heating the bus storage area as well. So in 2007 they bought a door – which cost $70,000, but would pay for itself, through energy savings, in two years.

Like many green solutions, the Madison bus garage door seems so obvious – but, according to Cieslewicz, it didn’t come about by chance. “It was such a simple answer,” he says. “But you don’t get the right answers unless you ask the right questions.”

What got Madison asking those questions in the first place was its engagement with The Natural Step (TNS) in a radical ‘change process’ to guide it towards the goal of ‘sustainability’ – and help it become one of the first Eco-Municipalities in North America.

TNS’s ‘municipal sustainability planning’ is different from your average city-level strategic plan, explains John Purkis of TNS Canada, in that it doesn’t only involve municipal officials. Key to the process is setting up a dozen or so task forces with representation from local government, business and members of the public, who work to “create descriptions of success for anything from the waste water system to the transport system”.

Another central element is ‘backcasting’, the unique approach TNS has been using successfully with businesses and organisations alike for the last 20 years. Through this, people visualise what their community would be like if it were truly sustainable, and then plan the steps to make that vision a reality.

The beauty of the process, explains Stanley Nyoni of TNS in Stockholm, is that it can be applied to societies anywhere in the world. “When we do backcasting in Sweden or Kenya,” he says, “the result is almost always the same. We agree at some level on what a sustainable society would be: what kind of energy, what kind of agricultural systems… I find that powerful in terms of bringing consensus.”

So far, the Eco-Municipality movement has mobilised about 100 towns and cities, not only in North America but also in Europe and even in Africa.

Take Olds, Alberta, for example. The prairie town in the west of Canada has adopted a Municipal Strategic Plan that will have a trickle-down effect into existing plans on transportation, land use, economic development, etc. One of the goals to come out of the process is to minimise water use. Initiatives include a project encouraging residents to garden with native prairie plants that need less irrigation, and a scheme to replace all water meters in town with automatic smart meters. Olds has also installed photovoltaic panels on the roof of its local aquatic centre, to heat the swimming pool.

Most importantly, though, engaging with TNS has meant that business and community leaders within the town now have a common understanding of what sustainability is, and are working together to implement the new plan. “To tackle complicated problems, we need an over-arching perspective that uses a systems approach,” stresses Purkis. “Systems-thinking creates understanding of the connections in the system – that if we change one part of the system, another part is affected.”

Collaboration is also central to progress in Machakos, Kenya. The major rural centre, with a population of around 150,000, is partnering the Swedish Eco-municipality Robertsfors, a small town of 2,000, to create an action plan of its own. The partnership is slated to last four to five years, and has begun with ‘process-leader training’ sessions held in both towns to familiarise participants with how to actually shape an Eco-Municipality.

Initial projects in Machakos include a tree-planting programme, which has already seen 28,000 trees planted and is aiming for 100,000 by June, and an experimental organic farm to engage residents in ‘urban agriculture’ by using kitchen waste as compost for vegetable growing.

Purkis emphasises how important it is to support municipal governments in shaping the future – because, ultimately, “communities are on the front line of the sustainability challenge. They are where the impacts of poor air and water quality, climate change and diminishing natural resources are felt. They are where people live, work and play. They are where quality of life and health improves or declines.” – Chris Alden 

The Natural Step International is a Forum for the Future Partner.

5 May 2009

Chris Alden