For the first time, Mercer consulting published its annual Quality of Living city ranking, with a new brand new chart enclosed, called Eco-City Ranking. The new chart doesn’t show Toronto in a favourable light unlike the rest of the paper that sees the Toronto quality of living being 16th in the whole world.
This chart identified the best cities in terms of water availability and drinkability, waste removal, quality of sewage systems, air pollution and traffic congestion. In other words, the top-notch cities produce minimal pollution and use maximum renewable resources. Whilst we would anticipate the green cities such a Oslo to rate high, we wouldn’t have expected industrial cities such as Stuttgart to be more eco-friendly than Toronto, but they are! Even when you only compare the North American cities, Toronto didn’t do very well, scraping in at number 11. A few Canadian cities do however score highly – Ottawa was in joint place for 3rd along with Helsinki, Honolulo 2nd and first place goes to Canada with Calgary being named the top eco-friendly city. Montreal and Vancouver also did great for Canada, ranking a joint 13 in the eco-city chart.
When looking at the total figures from the paper, Toronto came in at 16, which doesn’t seem too poor, but we need to be aware of our eco responsibilities. “A city’s eco-status or attitude toward sustainability can have significant impact on the quality of living of its inhabitants”, was the points made by a senior researcher at Mercer and that’s what we want to be looking at.
Our dragging our heels in environmental quality of life may have control on our overall quality of life, quicker than many of us would expect.
Julie Kinnear is neighbourhood eco activist and a MLS listing Toronto specialist
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