The Urban China Initiative (a think tank focused on urbanization challenges in China and supported by McKinsey & Company) just published its most recent ranking of Chinese cities based on its own proprietary sustainability index. Take a look to find where your city ranks on the list.
What are the key messages?
Overall, China’s cities are becoming more, not less, sustainable.
Richer cities tend to perform better on the index and so most of them tend to be in the east or on the coast of China.
Greater sustainability correlates with size up to a point, that point being around 4.5 million people. After this, size doesn’t matter.
Greater sustainability correlates with increased population density up to a point, that point being around 8,000 people per square kilometer. After that, higher density doesn't lead to higher sustainability.
Five Chinese cities have already crossed these thresholds and 11 more are likely to do so soon, representing more than 20% of China’s population.
Improving sustainability in these cities requires new forms of action, which have proven successful in peer cities globally. These include many actions that are not hard to describe, but are hard to implement consistently, whether it is in energy savings and emissions reduction, tighter supervision of polluters, pricing resources to create rational usage, smart planning of and incentives to use public transport. Implementation, not conception, makes all the difference in China.
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