Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson’s aim has long been to make his city the world’s “greenest” by 2020, but according to researchers at Corporate Knights magazine, he has work to do.
The self-dubbed “magazine for clean capitalism” ranked Vancouver as North America’s fourth most sustainable city on a list last week.
San Francisco topped the list, followed by Washington, D.C., and Ottawa.
Cities were measured against 27 key performance indicators across five categories:
- environmental quality;
- economic security;
- governance and empowerment;
- infrastructure and energy; and
- social well-being.
Corporate Knights has ranked large cities in Canada for several years, and this is the company’s first effort to also assess major U.S. cities. Some of the main measures for sustainability include air pollution, household spending on shelter, population density and education.
Vancouver ranked dead last out of the 20 cities surveyed when it came to economic security, which includes the amount of money spent on shelter. The city did rank No. 1 in one area: infrastructure and energy.
