Urbanization and Sustainability in Sydney, New South Wales

When most people, at least here in the United States of America, think of a city within Australia they usually have one place in mind. This city being known as Sydney, New South Wales. Not only is Sydney the state capitol of New South Wales, but it is also the most populous city within all of Australia. You see Sydney is actually extremely old, and has housed the Indigenous People for around 30,000 years then later on it became home to the British settlers as well in 1788.

According to the 2014 World Urbanization Prospects, Sydney is a “medium-sized city” which means that it is home to 1 million to 5 million inhabitants. Although, with this being stated the United Nations goes onto say that, “while considered medium-sized by global standards, these cities are, in fact, the largest cities in 79 countries or areas.” Since these cities are actually quite large, and not really “medium-sized”, they tend to struggle with large population increases throughout there years of existence. For instance, the UN also talks about how “the global population living in medium-sized cities nearly doubled between 1990 to 2014, and is expected to increase by another 36 per cent between 2014 and 2030, growing from 287 million to 1.1 million.” With an overall growing population like this than this would only mean a growing number of energy usage within these cities.

The city of Sydney has done a great job with recognizing the problems that come with a growing population and a growing use of energy. The council of Sydney has come out with various reports that are targeted to let the public know their ambitious plans towards a more sustainable future for the city. These plans include creating a city that has little impact on the environment; which includes healthy ecosystems with clean air, waterways, and land. They propose that by addressing climate change as a serious problem, and creating renewable energy will create their sustainable city. Throughout the past 10 to 15 years Sydney has already begun to create this vision by drastically reducing their carbon emissions, and creating/using more green energy. For instance, the cities council’s latest Green Environmental Sustainability Progress Report showed the chart below that has their  past, present and future carbon emissions and how they have changed/going to change.