Urban Sustainability Initiatiave

The USI Approach

The Urban Sustainability Initiative ( USI ) is a collaborative effort between the University of California at Berkeley and a diverse range of public and private institutions in Asia , Africa and Latin America, seeking to integrate cutting edge science into the decision-making processes of urban areas throughout the developing world.

The overall goal of this initiative is to work with partner cities to build their capacity to develop in ways that minimize the environmental impacts of growth by:

1. Identifying and monitoring critical urban environmental indicators and the policies and practices that influence those indicators
2. Accelerating the application of existing promising technologies and management practices
3. Developing and demonstrating the application of improved technologies and management practices
4. Creating an extensive urban sustainability information network to share lessons learned with cities around the world

With financial support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, we are creating "living laboratories" in cities in Africa , Asia and Latin America to test new approaches to environmentally sustainable urban development. These new approaches are combined with existing promising practices to identify what works and why, and then to facilitate the transfer of technologies and practices that work to cities throughout the world.

Why focus on Urban Sustainability?

Urbanization is occurring on a staggering scale. The urban population of the world is estimated to increase from three billion in 2000 to five billion in 2030, with almost all of the growth occurring in developing countries. This population growth, combined with rapid industrial development, is altering our natural environment on multiple levels. Specific impacts will likely include: accelerating global climate change; increasing the already rapid rate of habitat loss and species extinction; significantly disrupting hydrological systems; dramatically increasing human exposure to biological pathogens and chemical pollutants; and creating built environments that are unsafe, unhealthy and otherwise ill-suited for human activities. It is clear that if cities continue to grow and consume using existing technologies and practices, the Earth’s critical life-support systems will soon be at risk.

Conventional solutions will not be enough. These are often financially inaccessible for developing cities, putting additional strain on the environment. A revolutionary shift in the way cities understand and manage their resources is therefore urgently needed. Cities, the fastest changing components of the human landscape, and the historical loci of innovation and change, offer the challenge and opportunity to redefine our relationship with nature. However, to date, limited scientific and financial resources have been dedicated to addressing the unique challenges of developing country cities, where the pressures of growth are strongest and capacity is often weakest.

Dowload the USI Brochure

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