Cape Town is Globally Green

Those of us fortunate enough to call CAPE TOWN home know that there are a lot of tree-hugging ''yippies'' * to be found in and around the Mother City. Just spend an afternoon with some of the locals in Scarborough, Kommetjie and Noordhoek (way down in the ‘Deep South’ near Cape Point) and you’ll hear plenty of green chit chat over recycled glasses of organic wine.

In fact Cape Town is often ragged for being a bit OTT on environmental matters.

Well, it turns out we’re not all talk. Cape Town has been voted one of the Top 10 cities in the world most likely to be a ‘Global Sustainability Centre’ by the year 2020.

A New York-based business ethics and social responsibility think-tank, The Ethisphere Institute, researched metropolitan centres around the world to discover which ones had the best, most-likely-to-succeed plans to improve environmental sustainability.

According to Ethisphere’s website, the cities had to qualify on several factors including population size, economies, culture, education facilities and general global significance – in other words smaller towns couldn’t sneak in – it’s a lot tougher for a big city to pull off the kind of changes required than a one-horse village with a general store and miniscule population.

Ethisphere says: “Of course, (the cities) also needed to have a plan in place that will shift their bulky, mega-hub selves onto an environmentally sustainable path so that by 2020 … they will be sustainability role models.”

The environmental and sustainability practices taken into consideration during the voting process include

• Arts and culture
• Health and recreation
• Innovation and investment.
• Media and speech
• Education
• Economic and business environment
• Regulatory framework
• Law enforcement and transparency
• Transportation and housing

The fact that Cape Town is motivated to get certain of its sustainability plans underway by 2010 for the FIFA World Cup counted in the city’s favour. Cape Town’s sustainable development program aims at having 10% of homes using solar power, plus having 10% of their energy consumption coming from renewable sources, by 2020.

The other top 10 cities that made it are:

• Toronto
• Hyderabad
• Singapore
• Abu Dhabi
• New York
• London
• Frankfurt
• Curitiba
• Melbourne

* Urban Dictionary defines a yippie as “the combination of a yuppy and a hippie – i.e someone who has upper class income but still has a hippy type lifestyle”.

(Main Image by Joy-Anne Goodenough. All rights reserved. Small image by The Show Must Go On. Some Rights Reserved. http://flickr.com/photos/harleyccoper/272310471/ )