Policy for Impact Investing in Sustainable Cities

One of the priorities of this June?s Rio+20 conference in Rio de Janeiro alongside more traditional sustainability topics like water and energy is cities. According to the UN, about half the world?s population today lives in cities, and the proportion of city dwellers is due to increase substantially throughout the 21^st century.

Cities are vibrant, energetic centers of knowledge, economic activity, and culture. They have the capacity to encourage ecologically sustainable lifestyles due to the efficiencies in housing, transport, and energy that arise from living in close proximity to others and crucial destinations like work and food markets. Cities can also be tremendously unsustainable and wasteful because of the sheer number of people living and working in the same place, depending on how those efficiencies are leveraged.

Having hundreds of thousands or millions of people living in the same place presents opportunities for technological and structural innovation in support of sustainability goals. The scale of cities allows for limited financial and human capital resources to be leveraged for potentially significant social and environmental benefits.

While figuring out the infrastructure and other changes necessary to help develop a sustainable city?which we are narrowly defining as one that mitigates climate-change emissions in line with international consensus?is a challenging enough technical problem, the concept of sustainable cities also offers a unique challenge to think about the policy implications of funding models that can help propel the development of sustainable cities.

Cities sit within up to six different levels of policy?ward or neighborhood, city, county or state, region, national, international, and global?all of which have different authorities and implications for both policy development. Additionally, the complexity of the different aspects of sustainability?water, waste, transportation, green buildings, and clean energy, to start?make sifting through the policy environment a difficult task.

Hidden in this complexity, however, are unique and innovative policies that can better leverage public investment and draw in private capital to propel cities towards sustainability.

Our research in 2012 dives right into this tangle of policies and legal authorities to uncover some of the most interesting and forward looking examples of public policy driving private investment towards the development of sustainable cities. We look forward to sharing our case studies and research with you, and invite you to let us know of any policies that you see in your communities that might be relevant.

For more information on how we?re thinking about the possibilities for impact investing in sustainable cities, see ?Making Sustainable Cities Investable? by David Wood on the Low2No project website: http://www.low2no.org/essays/making-sustainable-cities.

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