City-Level Decoupling-Full Report

City-Level Decoupling: Urban resource flows and the governance of infrastructure transitions

about viable technology alternatives. This will entail procurement criteria that favour innovation, regulatory reforms that open up markets monopolised by existing infrastructure providers, social processes that encourage and stimulate a culture of innovation, funding flows to support networks of innovators, and protective measures that will create space for innovations to mature to a point where they can compete in the open market. Associations, networks and partnerships that pool knowledge, share risk, mobilize support and instigate innovation will be required. • Intermediaries need to be formally contracted into the urban transition process and they need a relatively stable operating and funding environment. An appropriate balance between accountability and flexibility will be needed: accountability to prevent ruptures between stakeholders and intermediaries, and flexibility to allow intermediaries to test ideas and develop appropriate innovations. • In developing country cities that stand to benefit from large-scale investments in new urban infrastructures aimed at poverty eradication, investors need to promote sustainability-oriented innovations at the technical, institutional and relational levels. In many ways, these cities have an advantage because they are not locked into the outdated technologies that many developed country cities are seeking to replace, at great cost. resources and the re-use of waste in cities can contribute significantly to decoupling rates of resource use from economic growth and promote impact decoupling as well. • Private sector players can clearly play key roles as both knowledge brokers and investors in order to take to scale proven niche innovations that could be translated into new city-wide sustainable urban infrastructure demonstration projects. • More efficient use of limited resources, improved management of renewable

spatial planning guidelines, infrastructure investment strategies, financial capability (for revenue collection, borrowing, capital and operational expenditure), and long- term sustainability goals. Projecting the desired metabolic flows per capita given the economic and ecological context of any given city will provide a clear-cut and understandable framework for assessing progress towards more sustainable resource use. • The capacity of city-level governments and their partners, such as universities, to collect and process quantitative data about urban metabolic flows need to be enhanced. Adopting a globally standardised methodology will make performance benchmarking possible (e.g. water use per capita across all cities would make it possible for all cities to identify strategic targets for consumption). A good start would be to adopt the highly systematic methodology developed for the city of Paris discussed earlier. creating infrastructures that stimulate urban development and prepare cities for a long-term transition to a greener economy, which, by definition, includes a low-carbon, resource-efficient world. This can be achieved by setting specific resource productivity targets for each infrastructure service (e.g. litres of water per unit of GDP, or percentage of passenger trips by public transport). • Government investments in urban infrastructures should be aimed at • Although national and city-level investments in urban infrastructure either exist or are being considered in many countries, greener growth will require including improvements in resource productivity as a key investment criterion.

This will typically mean widening the environmental criteria to include both resource and impact decoupling.

• Relevant niche (micro-level) innovations at city level need to be actively supported and networked in order to stimulate knowledge

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