Dear EarthTalk: What is “smart growth” and how does it benefit the environment? And what are the downsides, if any? -- Frank Quinn, Missoula, MT

Originating in the early 1970s when city planners began renovating crumbling inner cities in the face of widespread suburbanization and sprawl, smart growth is now a top buzzword in both municipal policy and environmental circles. Some form of smart growth has likely been implemented where you live or somewhere nearby.

Urban planners subscribing to a smart growth philosophy work to concentrate growth in the center of existing cities and towns to avoid sprawling development in areas otherwise prized for open space. Part of a smart growth effort attempts to minimize automobile traffic and its pollution in urban centers by including stores, residences and schools in neighborhoods, resulting in more walking, bicycle riding and mass transit usage than in a typical suburban environment. Advocates maintain that smart growth initiatives create a unique sense of community and place, give people more transportation, employment and housing choices, and equitably distribute the costs and benefits of development while preserving and enhancing natural beauty, cultural resources and public health.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been a big smart growth booster since it formed the Smart Growth Network in 1996. Partners include environmental and historic preservation groups, professional organizations, developers, real estate interests, and local and state government entities. The network serves as a forum for educating the public and policymakers about the benefits of smart growth and fostering idea sharing and community among practitioners and advocates of smart growth planning.

Partly thanks to the Smart Growth Network, smart growth initiatives are numerous across the U.S. today. Denver, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Chicago and dozens of other metropolitan areas have experienced urban renewal in the last two decades thanks to planning that has taken into account livability, sustainability and preservation of open space. Communications channels facilitated via the Smart Growth Network enable the successes and failures of previous smart growth initiatives to be learning tools for planning new ones.

Smart growth is not without its detractors. According to Todd Litman of the Canadian-based Victoria Transport Policy Institute, “small government” conservatives and libertarians criticize smart growth for infringing on freedom by instituting complicated layers of regulation over development plans, increasing traffic congestion and air pollution, reducing the affordability of urban housing while forcing locals out and creating undesirable levels of density, and requiring wasteful transit subsidies, among other beefs.

Even the environmental community is somewhat divided. The majority view some development and expansion as inevitable (especially with human population always on the upswing)—and in that light embrace smart growth as a realistic lesser of possible evils. But a smaller segment of greens questions whether any development—smart or otherwise—is good for a given region’s natural systems. But while such debates may rage on at universities and think tanks, smart growth is already becoming the standard lens through which development projects are judged in the majority of our metropolitan areas.

CONTACTS: EPA, www.epa.org; Smart Growth Network, www.smartgrowth.org; Todd Litman’s "Evaluating Criticism of Smart Growth," www.vtpi.org/sgcritics.pdf.

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The report from the World Business Council for Business Development (WBCSD) - Vision 2050: The New Agenda for Business – calls on businesses around the world to “develop strategies that would enable a global population of some 9 billion people to live well within the resources of the planet by 2050.”

A group of twenty-nine companies - led by Alcoa, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Storebrand and Syngenta – helped develop the report, which focuses on “the roles that business must play over the next few decades to enable society to move toward being sustainable.”

Alcoa Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Dr. Mohammad A. Zaidi, who co-chaired the 18-month project, said: “The world already has the knowledge, science, technologies, skills and financial resources needed to achieve Vision 2050. However, concerted global action in the next decade will be required to bring these capabilities and resources together, putting the world on the path to sustainability.”

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) is a CEO-led, global association of some 200 companies dealing exclusively with business and sustainable development. Members are drawn from more than 36 countries and 22 major industrial sectors.

The Vision 2050 report identifies a “critical pathway” that includes:

• Addressing the development needs of billions of people, enabling education and economic empowerment, particularly of women, and developing radically more eco-efficient solutions, lifestyles and behavior;
• Incorporating the cost of externalities, starting with carbon, ecosystem services and water;
• Doubling of agricultural output without increasing the amount of land or water used;
• Halting deforestation and increasing yields from planted forests;
• Halving carbon emissions worldwide (based on 2005 levels) by 2050, with greenhouse gas emissions peaking around 2020 through a shift to low-carbon energy systems and highly improved demand-side energy efficiency;
• Providing universal access to low carbon mobility; and
• Delivering a four-to-tenfold improvement in the use of resources and materials.

"Making these changes – and more – will enable us to consume just over one planet’s worth of ecological resources in 2050, as opposed to the 2.3 planets we will be using if we continue on the business-as-usual path we are on today,” the report says.

Vision 2050 suggests that the “transformation ahead” represents “vast opportunities” in a broad range of business segments as the global challenges of growth, urbanization, scarcity and environmental change become “the key strategic drivers” for business in the coming decade.

In natural resources, health and education alone, the broad order of magnitude of some of these could be around US$ 0.5-1.5 trillion per annum in 2020, rising to between US$ 3-10 trillion per annum in 2050 at today’s prices, which is around 1.5-4.5% of world GDP in 2050, according to the report.

WBCSD said project member companies on Vision 2050 were Accenture, Alcoa, Allianz, ArcelorMittal, The Boeing Company, Duke Energy Corporation, E.ON, Eskom, Evonik Industries, FALCK Group, Fortum Corporation, GDF SUEZ, GrupoNueva, Holcim, Infosys Technologies, Osaka Gas Co., PricewaterhouseCoopers, The Procter & Gamble Company, Rio Tinto, Royal Philips Electronics, Sony Corporation, Storebrand, Syngent  International, The Tokyo Electric Power Company, Toyota Motor Corporation, Umicore, Vattenfall, Volkswagen and Weyerhaeuser Company.

The Vision 2050 report can be downloaded here.

Kris Gopalakrishnan, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Infosys Technologies, India, says it's important for  business leaders to establish a corporate values framework.

“Every company must define a framework for values, a framework for ethics, a framework for behavior of its leaders," he says. "Leaders must walk the talk, leaders must lead by example.  There has to be zero tolerance for values violations.”

You can watch the video here.