Green Space

Corporate Knights magazine has published its annual revue of the most sustainable cities in the land, and Halifax is the leader in the medium sized city category. Other winners include Yellowknife in the small city category and Edmonton, of all places, in the large city category.

The Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM), which scored 6.94 out of 10, is one of the few municipalities that have insecticide and pesticide bans throughout the city. HRM is integrating sustainability into its decision-making through its corporate-wide Sustainability Transition Team, with its 20 members representing several departments throughout the organization. The municipality is also developing a sustainability filter against which all corporate decisions will be weighed. RM is currently retrofitting buildings and pools to utilize geothermal, and buil several new community centres in 2008 that utilize geothermal energy. HRM also had the highest Governance and Empowerment score of all cities. The municipality also requires bike lanes on certain types of new roads and has received much praise on the Halifax Harbour Cleanup.

Despite the high score, there is room to improve: Halifax has the largest proportion of Canadian-born visible minorities in the country, but no visible minorities sit on its city council. Click here to read the full article.

Originally published in the January 2009 edition of Corporate Knights Magazine. For more articles like these, subscribe to Corporate Knights at corporateknights.ca/subscribe.