The United Nations (UN) has released a report showing that greening city urban infrastructure can sustain economic growth while using fewer natural resources. The report ‘City-Level Decoupling: Urban Resource Flows and the Governance of Infrastructure Transitions’ included thirty cases showing the benefits of having gone green. The report was compiled during 2011 by the International Resource Panel (IRP), which is hosted by the UN Environment Program (UNEP). The findings show that investing in sustainable infrastructures and resource-efficient technologies in cities offers an opportunity to deliver economic growth, with lower rates of environmental degradation, poverty reduction, lower greenhouse-gas emissions and improved wellbeing. About three-quarters of the world’s natural resources are currently consumed in cities and the proportion of the global population living in urban areas is set to rise to 70% by 2050. Simultaneously, cities offer lower per capita resource use and emissions than their surrounding areas. The report shows that greater effort is needed to support new and improved infrastructure for water, energy, transport, waste and other sectors located in and around cities to wean the world off unsustainable consumption patterns and avoid serious economic and environmental implications for future generations. With regard to the private sector, the report recommends that it should invest and share expertise to take small-scale sustainable infrastructure projects to a citywide scale.
