Where do you look if you’re a city aspiring to go green? California feels you should take a trip, no, not to that sunny state, but to their Best Practices website and take a gander at advice from the pros.
Green Cities California is an online storehouse of information compiled by 10 cities and counties that are considered leaders in groundbreaking environmental policy.
As the forerunners of urban sustainability, these locales have graciously offered to inform and educate other municipalities on the whys and hows of everything from energy and waste reduction to transportation and water conservation. To date, the site has 50 best practices listed, and members are working on another 65.
The wealth of knowledge, including policy downloads, is accessible without charge and, though based on California models, the information is intended to be adaptable to other areas.
The goal of the site is to enable other jurisdictions to accelerate forward-thinking agendas and implement sustainability policies with as little trouble as possible. The current members of Green Cities California include Berkeley, Los Angeles, Pasadena, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Barbara, Santa Monica and Marin County. They have all dealt with and successfully overcome obstacles to improving their city’s environmental performance and feel that sharing methods of troubleshooting and ways to implement green programs will help other cities to combat climate change. After all, for the first time in history, the majority of the population of earth is concentrated in urban centers. As well, local municipalities are becoming increasingly more effective in implementing green policy because of being smaller and more flexible forms of government.
As green collaboration and forums grow in popularity and usefulness, we’ll find that ‘knowledge-swapping’ is a productive way to work towards the goal of preserving earth. And why not? Two heads are better than one. Municipally speaking.
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