City Dwellers Are More Environmentally Friendly (VIDEO)
Kudos to city dwellers! “The average New Yorker has a carbon footprint one-third the size of the average American,” Rohit “Rit” Aggarwala, special advisor to C40 Cities Chief and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, recently told genConnect at the Aspen Environment Forum.
Watch Aggarwala talk about how you can reduce your footprint, wherever you live:
Rit Aggarwala
WATCH: ‘A Tremendous Set’ of Environmental Challenges
Cities face their own set of environmental challenges, Aggarwala said, but they are aware that “the environment, public health and quality of life actually work perfectly together just as a kind of triple bottom-line definition of sustainability.”
The C40 group, a Climate Leadership Group which is comprised of 59 worldwide cities working together on climate change, notes that cities aren’t doing it perfectly as they must overcome water supply and public waste hurdles. However, if cities “make progress on any of those, there is usually a climate change benefit,” Aggarwala said. “Your carbon emission will decrease; your carbon footprint will decrease.”
WATCH: A ‘Fertile Environment for New Ideas’
So if you live in a city, you already are doing a little bit of good for the environment. But if you want to do even more, “live closer to your job or public transportation,” Aggarwala said. “How you use transportation is the biggest contribution.”
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I think, though, that the existence and continued maintenance and development of the city will be responsible for an enormous environmental footprint. Share the impact footprint of the city itself among its residents and I think things might look a bit different?