C o n f e r e n c e__T h e m e

Sustainability is moving mainstream.

Its issues, challenges and imperatives are now understood to touch our lives in every way. Sometime has become right now because of growing concern about carbon emissions and climate change, and numerous other systemic challenges to urban and regional management.

Locally and globally, an expanding community gets sustainability’s urgent, central messages: “Don’t mortgage the future.” “Don’t treat environmental impacts as externalities.”

Everyone is trying to understand the tasks, programs, practices and shifts required to achieve a sustainable future in which our consumption methods, lifestyle and urban practices renew natural systems rather than producing further deficits.

It’s the local level—community, city, region, institution—at which people truly connect with the sustainability message. People live and identify locally. It’s where they form their communities, operate their business, enjoy their lives. It’s the level at which responses are tangible and achievable.

But the job of translating sustainability’s urgencies and imperatives into practical community and urban programs presents significant challenges. With all the good will in the world, civic and regional leaders are still trying to define and implement coherent, integrated sustainability plans.

How do we sort out confusing messages?

How do we shift from conventional cost thinking to whole-cost thinking? What are the metrics and economic implications? How do we marshal the community resources? Is sustainability about technology ‘fixes,’ new policies with changed incentives and restrictions, community lifestyle changes, or all of these? How do we order this stuff? How do we organize sustainability programs that themselves are sustainable until we achieve the desired outcomes?

In a British Columbia setting, how do we make operational the goals of the recent UBCM charter?

All of this will be the context for the 3rd Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit, May 22-24, 2008 in Victoria.

GG3 will bring together leaders and leadership teams from ‘champion cities’—North American places large and small that have made significant progress in urban sustainability programs—to explore their initiatives and the conditions that currently foster or frustrate whole-city shift toward sustainability.

As a way of studying successful formulas for leadership, policy creation, civic engagement, innovation, and performance measurement, the conference will focus on places that have been able to fast-track their emissions reduction goals and other sustainability programs.

To leverage the value of so much assembled expertise, the conference will invite political, professional, business and organizational leadership from BC’s cities, communities and regions to the conference—to exchange ideas, foster local learning, build capacity, inspire, and assist progress toward the goals of the province’s Green Cities and Climate Change Initiatives.

This conference will be an opportunity for leaders in a wide range of fields of practice—across business and industry, government, learning institutions, advocacy organizations, public interest—to tackle issues with a common vocabulary and a shared vision of the future. It’s a conference for problem-solvers who see the benefits of new collaborations and who relish the opportunity to take in new knowledge and improve their skills.