The first ever Sustainable Cities Index has come out, and quite a few Canadian names have made it on there! Released by the Canadian company Corporate Knights, the list looks at a variety of factors to see which cities are leading the charge in the whole environmentally-friendly scenario.

To create the list, the company looked at a wide variety of factors. These range from the classics like emissions per capita to water access to even a city’s ‘climate change resilience’. These were then weighted together, to create a letter score for each city included.

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Here are all the indicators they looked at:

  • Scope 1 greenhouse gas emissions per capita (occurs within city boundaries)
  • Consumption-based emissions per capita
  • Air quality
  • Open public space
  • Water access
  • Water consumption
  • Vehicle dependency
  • Road infrastructure efficiency
  • Sustainable transport
  • Solid waste generated
  • Climate change resilience
  • Sustainable policies

So, going off of that, these are the Canadian cities to make the most sustainable list:

  1. Vancouver (Global Rank – 8)
  2. Toronto (Global Rank – 9)
  3. Ottawa (Global Rank – 11)
  4. Halifax (Global Rank – 18)
  5. Montreal (Global Rank – 20)
  6. Edmonton (Global Rank – 21)
  7. Calgary (Global Rank – 22)

So yeah, pretty much all of the country’s major cities (minus Winnipeg) got on there! There’s obviously some disparity in the breakdown, but none of the cities listed has lower than a “B” grade overall, so that’s not so bad!