We recently spoke at the Sweden and California Sustainable Innovation Conference in San Francisco, California. Despite differences in industry and population, the governments of Sweden and California share similar sentiments and regulations on energy and the environment. They also share ambitions to lead in environmental issues, and even formal agreements on specific goals and metrics.
One example of their overlapping interest is environmental management of urban regions. Generally, 50% of the populations in industrialized countries live in cities, which pose specific environmental challenges for city-based administrators – as opposed to their national counterparts.
Among the speakers was Caroline Dahl from the County Administrative Board of Skåne – the Swedish side of the Öresund strait, an urban region encompassing Copenhagen and home to 3.7 million inhabitants. She told the audience, “In the 1970s, you could not dip a toe in the water flowing around Stockholm, an island city. Today, you can fish and swim and drink it – a situation almost unique among capital cities around the world. Sweden has reduced sulfur emissions to levels not seen since World War I.”
She also discussed how the country’s Symbiocity program links urban systems so that waste from one system becomes fuel for another. To illustrate, she described the municipal plants converting landfill and agricultural waste into biofuel, which is done “a lot” in Skåne. In addition, the bus fleet in the region’s largest city, Malmö, runs on biogas made from agricultural and municipal waste.
From the California side, we heard about Sustainable Oakland. While Oakland is notorious for gang violence rivaling that of Chicago and Los Angeles, it’s also earning a reputation as an increasingly green city for fielding initiatives from water meters to building codes. Garrett Fitzgerald, the city’s Sustainability Coordinator, talked about some of the palpable reasons that San Francisco’s sister city is so concerned about climate change: “We’ve seen sea levels rise seven inches over the last 150 years, and we expect maybe three feet over the next 100 – that means we would lose both airports in the region (both SFO and OAK are built on reclaimed land at the waterfront). We’ve seen snowpack reducing, which means less water – as much as 20% to 40% reduction.”
He said that 58% of Oakland’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions come from transportation, so the group’s top priorities are transit-oriented. The city is pursuing a goal of 0% waste by 2020, and pointed out that San Francisco is tops in the U.S. on this metric. Toward that goal, he said, “We’re looking at a lot of waste-to-energy technologies, but we are not convinced they are the way to go. Specifically, by assigning a commodity value to waste we might inadvertently cause people to stop reducing their consumption by giving them the false impression that waste has value and ‘isn’t that bad.’”
As progressive urban regions bisected by water, the Öresund region and the San Francisco Bay area are natural partners. Each provides a fertile test ground for companies interested in developing sustainable technologies, based on similar characteristics. Namely, millions of consumers willing to experiment with environmental products and programs, economically diverse industries and markets, and politicians eager to try new solutions. With increasing coordination, these groups offer scale and comparability and a combination that’s more than the sum of its parts.
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