Seattle Sustainabilty: Decades Of Effort Lie Ahead
Sustainability is a never-ending quest, but there are goalposts. For instance, can Seattle, known as one of the greenest cities in the country, achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, as mandated by the Seattle Climate Action Plan?
Probably so, but strong challenges remain to reaching that goal and other goals in efficient buildings, water usage and transit, according to the speakers at our recent Seattle Sustainability event.
Touchstone president A-P Hurd kicked off the event, saying U.S. major metros are now the focus of economic activity, job creation and innovation — including sustainability (the areas in green on her chart).
Growth markets, which tend to be cities, tend to focus more on improving the environment. Not because other places do not care, but because a thriving economy allows officials and citizenry to focus more on the problems of the environment.
Seattle is one of those places, she said. The city has had considerable successes in green building, but there are more challenges ahead.
One challenge in particular is reducing carbon emissions from transportation, which is a large share of all emissions. That means fostering connections within the city that will be beneficial to the environment. Car-sharing services, done the right way, will be very important in reaching that goal. Those services make people less reliant on their own cars and more likely to use public transit.
What does Seattle's sustainable future look like? Our development speakers took up that question. One important answer is more nature within the city. Years of research show more natural features make cities better places to live, improving education, worker productivity and healthcare effectiveness.
More nature in the city is not just green space, though that is important. It is also neighborhood walkability and the ability of buildings to capture natural light or include gardens or other such features.
Seemingly at odds with more nature in a city is that cities need to be more dense. For a number of reasons, density improves the environment, especially by reducing carbon emissions. But green space and density are not contradictions, at least if there is thoughtful planning both by public and private entities.
The right incentives to promote sustainable goals need to be in place, our speakers said, which is not particularly easy. The rewards must be directed to the entities that make the investment in green building practices, and that is not always the case now, especially for existing buildings. Incentives must also be aligned to promote density, which promotes efficiency in land, energy and water use.
Mandates are not particularly popular, but they have their place. Laws are made, rules are formulated, there is pushback from owners and developers, the rules are modified, and eventually they become assimilated into the business fabric of the community. Mandates can be hard at first, but over the long run the most progressive energy codes in the country have helped make their local economies more robust. Money that was buying fuel is staying in town as profits and wages.
