The Top End leads the race when it comes to sustainable living, writes Anna Muston
Darwin trumped 19 other competing Australian cities to win the title of ‘Most Sustainable City’, after the results of a study undertaken by the Australian Conservation Foundation were released.
The Sustainable Cities Index assessed and ranked the cities by looking at their progress in 15 environmental areas such as ecological footprint, action on climate change and green buildings.
It also considered variables of employment, health and household repayments.
ACF project coordinator, Michael Trigg, said the results were quite unexpected.
“We were surprised that Darwin came out on top, given the considerable environmental, social and economic issues still facing that city,” he said.
Despite taking out the title, Darwin is still eight times less sustainable than an ideal city, which would perform highly in all categories.
This led the ACF to conclude that no Australian city can be viewed as complete in its aims to achieve environmental sustainability.
While all states have been given something to work towards, some have a lot more areas of required growth than others.
Queensland was home to five of the top 10 scoring cities, doing significantly better than Western Australia, whose one included city (Perth) got the wooden spoon.
Perth’s main downfalls were its lack of public transport and poor water conservation, despite the WA Water Corporation’s campaigns encouraging Western Australians to “save six buckets of water everyday”.
Melbourne and Sydney will be disappointed with their respective rankings of 7th and 12th, despite appearing to have each performed quite well across the board.
They will both have to improve in the areas of public participation and subjective wellbeing if they hope to perform better in the future.
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 3:11 pm