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Changing a City: Inside Portland's 80 Percent by 2050 Target (interview)
Alex Aylett, Worldchanging
Last week the City of Portland and Multnomah County jointly passed one of North America's most ambitious Climate Change Action Plan (CAP), which commits the city and county to reducing their overall emissions by 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

Portland has been a leading city on climate change policy since 1993, when it became the first city adopt a strategy to reduce carbon emissions. It is also the only North American city that has managed to reduce its emissions below 1990 levels (despite an 18 percent growth in population). Nonetheless, the plan opens with the sobering point that “perhaps the most important lesson learned from local climate protection work to date is the frank recognition that our good work...is not nearly enough.” (A familiar mia culpa, well in line with how serious things have gotten.)

What follows in the rest of the 70 page plan (pdf) is an example of what it might look like if cities truly take sustainability seriously. The plan is packed with useful information and strategy. You can find more complete review here.

The standout element is the way the city has positioned itself to facilitate a broad shift that extends well past what it controls directly. This is much more than leading by example. Through a combination of educational programs, public consultations, economic development planning and the coordination of financial incentives, the municipality is leading change across the city as a whole. To find out more, I caught up with Deputy Director of Portland's Bureau of Planning and Sustainability Micheal Armstrong via e-mail.

Alex Aylett: Early municipal climate action plans, both in North America and in Europe, tended to focus on things that the municipal government controlled directly: street lighting, municipal buildings, landfill sites, etc. Portland's new CAP, on the other hand, really is an action plan for the whole city. Tell me a bit about that more ambitious approach to municipal sustainability.

Micheal Armstrong: Since 1993 Portland’s climate-protection work has consistently included both its own operations and community-wide emissions. Our operations represent about one percent of total local emissions, so there’s a modest but real opportunity to achieve meaningful reductions. We clearly need to be making the same prudent investments in efficiency and renewables that others are making...
(3 Nov 2009)

The report is online here and in related news:

sent in by EB reader Randall Scott, who says:
We have so much work to do in America. Bright Neighbor and members of the City of Portland are coordinating a 95-neighborhood fruit and nut tree pruning / grafting project this February. It is a pilot project designed to sequester carbon at the source, create food security, and build community. Wish us luck!.

Zone5 Podcast #1 with Albert Bates and #2 with Noel Carillo
Graham Strout, Zone 5
Welcome to the first Zone5 Podcast!

These are likely to come out rather irregularly but I might manage one a month or so.

Albert Bates at the charcoal barrel at Cloughjordan Eco-village, August 2009

This first podcast is with Albert Bates of The Farm, Tennessee, who I interviewed in back in August . Albert talks about permaculture, Powerdown, the Cloughjordan Eco-village where the interview took place, organic food and much more...
(3 Nov 2009)

Urban Permaculture in Clacton-on-Sea (video)
Chris Southall, EcoDIY
Climate change and peak oil (limits to the available supply of oil) and overuse of other natural resources are facing us all with an unprecedented crisis.

In this video meet a family who believe in taking personal responsibility for the way they live and effect the world around them. Follow the progress of them applying energy and water saving ideas to their house and their move towards urban self sufficiency in Clacton-on-sea in Essex, Great Britain.

For More Information Please Visit: http://www.ecodiy.org/
(20 Sept 2009)

Toward an Ethic of Place: Experiments in Regional Governance
Matthew McKinney, planetizen
Matthew McKinney argues that regional governance is essential to address transboundary issues like climate change, wildlife corridors, shared water resources, and energy development.

The Crown of the Continent is one of North America's most majestic landscapes. The 10 million acre region -- located in southern Alberta, British Columbia, and northwestern Montana -- is home to First Nations and Native Americans, farmers and ranchers and footloose entrepreneurs, endangered species, wild and scenic rivers, national parks, and wilderness areas.

Yet this vast ecosystem, the headwaters of the Columbia and Missouri rivers, as well as Hudson Bay, is singularly ill-equipped to manage the challenges of the day – energy development, rapid growth in and around Calgary and Kalispell, and the impacts of climate change, just to name a few. That's because governance of the area is highly fragmented, across the United States and Canada, Alberta, British Columbia, and Montana, multiple First Nations, local, state, and federal governments, and private land. Similarly, Greater Calgary is a dynamic metropolitan region, but one struggling with serious urban-suburban conflicts over rapid growth, including water supply and wastewater issues, and the challenges of balancing massive resource extraction from oil sands and maintaining critical habitat for moose, bear, and beaver. But the area is a jumble of 19 different municipalities, all with different priorities and planning missions.

he Crown of the Continent and Greater Calgary illustrate one of the most persistent dilemmas in land and water policy: the territory of the land-use, natural resource, and environmental issues we face transcends the legal and geographic reach of existing jurisdictions and institutions. The people affected by this spatial mismatch have interdependent interests, which means that none of them has sufficient power or authority to address the problems adequately on their own. No single entity has the power or authority to address these types of transboundary issues, whether climate change, wildlife corridors, shared water resources, or energy development.

In our work at the Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Policy at the University of Montana, in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, we have identified this need to fill a governance gap, through both informal and formal means. Short of erasing existing political and jurisdictional boundaries, citizens and officials need to develop the capacity to work across boundaries according to the "problem-sheds" of the land and water issues we face in the 21st century....
(26 Oct 2009)