Toronto Needs to Put the Effort into Being Greener

A new chart has been printed by Mercer Consulting when it released its annual Quality of Living statement, called the Eco-City Ranking. While Toronto was positioned at a solid 16th place in the world and in third place in North America, in terms of regular quality of living, our position in the Eco-City chart is not so good.

The chart is worked on a number of factors such as water availability, how good the sewage systems are and air pollution. To sum up, if your city creates large amounts of pollution and doesn't use its renewable resources then it's not going to rank very highly. Industrial cities such as Pittsburgh and Düsseldorf beat Toronto, which only saw a rank of 39, not good news.

Narrowing the figures down somewhat, Toronto only came in 11th when linking it to the North American cities. Our Canadian cities do however score extremely well - Ottawa was in joint place for 3rd along with Helsinki, Honolulo 2nd and first place goes to Canada with Calgary being named the highest eco-friendly city. Montreal and Vancouver also did well for Canada, ranking a joint 13 in the eco-city article.

When looking at the overall figures from the article, Toronto came in at 16, which doesn't seem too unsatisfactory, but we need to be aware of our eco responsibilities. "A city’s eco-status or attitude toward sustainability can have significant impact on the quality of living of its inhabitants", was the points made by a senior researcher at Mercer and that's what we want to be looking at.

What we need to think about is, our environmental quality of life will influence us right now and in the long term.

Julie Kinnear has been local eco activist and a MLS listings Toronto realtor

picture by SweetOne