If you visit Cité Soleil in Haiti or any other of the world’s poorest mega slums, you will find children picking through giant piles of junk, playing in gullies running with polluted water and returning home to crowded shacks with the most unsanitary conditions.
If you go to affluent Vienna, you will see children playing in parks and kicking soccer balls on clean streets. When they go home, they do so with the certainty of enjoying clean water and good sanitation.
At first, this might seem like an unbalanced comparison. Vienna is the crown jewel of affluent Austria, so of course it can afford a clean environment. But that is exactly the point. There’s growing recognition that along with a clean environment, economic growth and social wellbeing are integral to sustainability. All three pillars make for sustainability – if even one is missing, the other two will lose support and collapse.
This insight is still counterintuitive for many. Some business leaders and environmentalists hold to a 20th century paradigm in which there must always be a zero-sum trade-off. Do you want cleaner air? Expect that to cost you in terms of jobs and economic growth. Want to increase social wellbeing? We will have to pay for that with less expenditure on clean water or air. Want a better environment? Then we must curtail business or social spending.
This zero-sum thinking is giving way to a 21st century model in which prosperity and sustainability are not trade-offs but drivers of mutual progress. Economic growth, ecological integrity and social wellbeing are so deeply interdependent that a city can now be considered durable only if it is based on all three of pillars of sustainability.
One of the most influential environmental movements, the Earth Day Network, marked its 45th anniversary last week describing 2015 as “the year in which economic growth and sustainability join hands”.
Unlike many environmental campaigns that oppose globalisation and business, EDN embraces the role of a growing economy in improving the environment. Through its Green Cities Campaign, EDN promotes increased public awareness that any green city must be energy and water efficient, promote renewable energy, adopt progressive public policies, and develop world-class practice in finance and education.
At Masdar City, we strive to strengthen these three pillars of economic growth, ecological integrity and social wellbeing. In looking to the future, we draw inspiration from ancient cities that were not built to conquer nature but to coexist with it.
Many of our features for ecological integrity and social wellbeing have roots in ancient cities like Iraq’s Erbil and Syria’s Damascus, where narrow walkways and low-rise buildings create shade against the relentless sun and where homes have a central courtyard to absorb natural light.
Today’s Masdar City uses these same principles of passive design and Estidama’s green building criteria to guide our urban planning.
A visitor to Masdar City is instantly aware that the temperature is 10°C lower than other parts of Abu Dhabi. Our buildings consistently save up to 40 per cent of the energy used by similar structures in the UAE. If we’re using less energy, we’re spending less money, which frees up capital to invest in cutting edge clean technology. In this way, ecological integrity, social wellbeing and economic growth are aligned.
And our growth continues. As we announced last week, construction has begun on a residential complex that will expand Masdar City’s ecosystem. It is based on a “greenprint” for absorbing growing urban populations while reducing energy and water consumption and waste. We are advancing the vision of Abu Dhabi’s leadership to build a low-carbon city shaped by innovation and sustainability and one that is also a centre of knowledge and global business.
Such a city is admittedly a dream for the world’s poor, but it need not be a distant dream. The World Bank reports that in 1990, 22 per cent of the world’s population lived in middle-income countries. That number rose to 72 per cent by 2011. As countries develop, the knowledge we gain at Masdar City about the three forms of sustainability will provide a priceless greenprint for the world.
Ahmad Belhoul is Masdar’s chief executive officer
