In a recent study published in the peer-reviewed journal Sustainability, Matthew Berman and Robert Orttung analyzed how well the premier global standard for measuring urban sustainability (ISO 37120) addresses the unique characteristics of Arctic cities.
Although there are many models for measuring urban sustainability, ISO 37120 provides the most comprehensive set of indicators, from economy and health to safety and transportation. It was first developed in 2014 by the International Organization for Standardization to help cities around the world “communicate amongst themselves using globally standardized, comparable data, allowing them to get insights into other cities and learn from each other like never before.” ISO 37120 was updated in 2018, adding even more indicators to its list.
It now boasts 49 equally-weighted core indicators, along with 59 supporting indicators and 24 profile indicators. Gathering all of this data can give cities insight into their sustainability, but does it work for Anchorage, Reykjavík or Yakutsk as well as it does for Seattle and São Paolo?
In fact, the complexity of ISO 37120 is one of its weak spots when applying this model to the Arctic, note Berman and Orttung in Measuring Progress toward Urban Sustainability: Do Global Measures Work for Arctic Cities? Northern cities are typically smaller, and don’t have the professional staff to compile such figures.
ISO 37120 also doesn’t take into account the unique geography, climate, economies, and histories of Arctic cities, which are united by their place on the globe, but disparate in many other regards. Important northern sustainability issues related to climate change adaptation, economic dependence on non-renewable resource extraction, and vulnerability to changing national geopolitical objectives don’t appear on the lengthy list of indicators.
But ISO 37120 can provide value as the “beginning of a conversation, a way to hold local governments accountable, and a useful component of a multi-method urban analysis,” wrote Berman and Orttung.
They detailed a number of ways that ISO 37120 could be improved for use in Arctic cities. For example, defining what factors are crucial in making one city more sustainable than another would help make the assumptions underlying the choice of indicators more explicit.
Adding a number of relevant indicators is also necessary to make this an effective tool for the Arctic. These include:
- reliance on non-renewable resource production in the surrounding region as a central component supporting the city’s economy;
- connections between a city and its broader regional ecosystem;
- relationships with and status of local Indigenous populations;
- severity of climate vulnerability concerns such as permafrost thaw and coastal erosion, and the city’s efforts to address these vulnerabilities; and
- measures of the efforts that the city leadership is taking to increase the level of the city’s sustainability overall.
About Matthew Berman
Dr. Matthew Berman is a Professor of Economics with University of Alaska Anchorage’s Institute of Social and Economic Research. His research interests include sustainable communities, social-ecological systems, political economy, and alcohol-control policy. He holds a Ph.D. and M. Phil in Economics from Yale University, and a BA in Economics from Harvard College.
About Robert Orttung
Dr. Robert Orttung is Assistant Director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies and an associate research professor of international affairs at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He received a B.A. in Russian Studies from Stanford University and both a M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles.
The study was funded by the National Science Foundation, Grant 1545913.
