Dublin could become a model of how a sustainable city should work and galvanise other cities to follow suit, the mayor of one of the world's most sustainable population centres has said.
Patrick Burt, mayor of Palo Alto, California, spoke in the Science Gallery on Pearse Street, Dublin tonight about how the city, located at the heart of Silicon Valley, had moved towards sustainability but also mentioned some of the pitfalls it had run into.
Palo Alto, which has a population of 65,000 people, has introduced numerous initiatives to achieve sustainability but Mr Burt noted that, to do so, the city had worked closely with academia, NGOs and private enterprise, as well as drawing on the social responsibility of its citizens who wished to put their personal environmental ethos into practice.
He said that cities such as Palo Alto and Dublin had the potential to influence other cities on a global scale to promote and encourage a sustainable future.
“The real opportunity that we have is to harness the intellectual capital of the people who work and live in the city, and that is the great challenge and opportunity before us going forward because frankly government has limited resources.”
“Without people like the ones in this room and people throughout your city there is no way that we can address and really overcome these challenges that we face today.
“The intellectual capital and the engagement at all different levels is the key, it's not what we can do from a top down approach.”
Mr Burt said that it was important that local governments were able to keep people informed and to bring their citizens along with them in their sustainable goals if they were to avoid a backlash from citizens.
For example, while waste reduction through recycling policies had proved hugely successful in Palo Alto, it also led to a $5 million deficit last year as this revenue stream disappeared leading to a public backlash at the rising cost of the now limited waste that needs to be collected.
Similar backlashes had occurred over water and energy conservation programmes.
“Government is bad at marketing . . . I think more and more we have to think about how to frame what we're doing in ways that our taxpayers, our residents and our businesses will be more receptive to what we're doing.”