It is a strange fact that after four or five decades of the modern environmental movement we still have no agreed definition of a sustainable community nor an agreed way of measuring progress towards sustainability.

We have a plethora of membership organizations and Communities of Practice dedicated to creating "green", "eco" or "sustainable" communities such as Eco-Cities, ICLEI, the signatories to the Aalborg Commitments, the Melbourne Principles, The Urban Environmental Accords, the US "Cool" Mayors and so many other organizations.  There is no shortage of frameworks to help steer progress but there is no widespread agreement on hard objective measures of what an Ecocity or sustainable community is, which communities have reached this standard and what humankind collectively has to achieve.

Most readers of this article will have heard about the miracles achieved by the world's leading communities in becoming "eco-cities" (or "eco-communities") and many of them were featured in presentations at the 2008 Ecocities conference in San Francisco.  Yet as humankind wakes up at an ever increasing rate to the need for a rapid and comprehensive transformation of our cities and communities, there is still much confusion about what needs to be done by when if we are to have any hope of a sustainable future. 

The last few months have seen a dramatic shift in targets that leading individuals and organizations are calling or humankind to achieve so I thought it would be useful to summarise (paraphrasing where necessary) the position of various world authorities on sustainability.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

An 80% reductions by 2050 will be required in order to limit atmospheric Co2 to no more than 450 ppm, to keep the average global temperate rise below 2 degrees Celcius so that we have a fighting chance of avoiding the worst excesses of climate change.

G8 "Leaders"

Well, kind of maybe around 50% by 2050 as long as the developing world leaders agree with us, which they don't so, let's plant a tree together and see you at the next conference.

James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute, US's leading climate scientist and member of the IPCC (AKA the Man George Bush tried to silence)

The IPCC is being far too conservative in its estimation of the speed of climate change.  450ppm will lead to catastrophic climate change and we need to get to a level of no more than 350ppm. (www.350.org).

It is worth noting that the current atmospheric GHG level is 385ppm so he is talking about a global GHG emissions peak within a very few years (less than a decade) and then a very rapid reduction thereafter.

He has called for an immediate moratorium on new coal fired power stations, which the Chinese alone are currently bringing online at the rate of about four per month.

Lester Brown, Earth Policy Institute, author of Plan b 3.0, Saving a Planet Under Stress and Civilisation in Crisis (www.earthpolicy.org)

With the equivalent of a war-time level of societal restructuring we can achieve a renewable energy revolutions and other breakthroughs that can lead to an
80% GHG emissions reductions by 2020.

Al Gore (in An Inconvenient Truth)

What the IPCC says (see above)

Al Gore (in 2008 after two summers of dramatically increased arctic ice melt)

A massive realignment of society is required (see L. Brown above) leading to 100% "clean" energy within ten years.

Barack Obama

Well kind of what Al Gore and Lester Brown say but without alienating special interest groups like corn (for ethanol) farmers, coal miners and nuclear power plant manufacturers.

Sweden
We will be free from oil and toxic chemicals by 2020 (and our leading communities such as Overturnea are pretty much there already).

My prediction is that the rest of the IPCC will soon catch up Mr Hansen and that 350ppm will soon become the new 450ppm.  However, this may take some time, and it will be interesting to see which countries, cities, communities, membership groups and Communities of Practice answer Mr Gore's call to action and Mr Brown's plans for a total societal transformation by 2020. 

Next month I will highlight communities that have largely achieved the transformations the rest of the world will have to complete by 2020, together with simple steps for breaking through political, community and bureaucratic barriers.