March is always a key month for cleantech in California. It starts the season of pre Earth Day events like the ECO:nomics conference in Santa Barbara. A first quarter into the year, the cleantech community gathers in San Francisco at the Cleantech Summit to discuss the new trends. The CEO of Cleantech Group opened the 10th Summit with a keynote on the power of global partnerships in cleantech.
One evidence of that is the multiplication of green business and networking events around the world. Agrion is an organization with offices in San Francisco, New York City, Paris, Frankfurt, and Beijing. They animate the local debate in energy, cleantech and corporate sustainability by offering almost daily webinars and monthly gatherings in each city. I attended their symposium on smart cities last week, and San Francisco remains a key hub for them.
In a recent article of the National Geographic Magazine, Robert Kunzig makes the case that smart cities could be the solution for our growing environmental and social pains. As a matter of fact, dense cities tend to emit less greenhouse gas emissions than the national average. It is particularly true for the United States, consuming 25 tons of CO2 equivalent per person on average compared to 10 tons in New York City. It is not the case for China, consuming 4 tons per person on average compared to 11 tons in Beijing.
China is experiencing an important phase of urbanization. Annualy, twelve million chinese people move from rural to urban areas. That is equivalent to a new city of the size of Beijing (picture right) every year! As a result, China has taken the lead in terms of cities with over one million inhabitants: 89 in China, 46 in India and 42 in US. However, this puts a lot of pressure on providing basic food and water services. If designing smarter cities makes sense, leaving rural development behind does not appear as a sustainable proposition.
Later this month, it will be the six year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina that devastated the city of New Orleans and its surrounding parishes. Like many of us on August 29 2005, Matt Petersen was gripped with the horrible images on CNN. More than the failure of the levees, it is the failure of the Government to respond to the needs of its citizens that horrified him during the following days.
“What can I do?” he asked himself. Matt Petersen had been the CEO of Global Green USA for a decade, raising awareness on the dangers of climate change part of Green Cross International, and working primarily on green building initiatives with schools and cities in the US. “Well, we can get money. And we did.” Matt explains me as he remembers his thought process in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. “We thought maybe we could adopt a family and give them a place to rest…”
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