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| A demonstration sign reads "Replace DTE" on April 23, 2022. Photo by author. |
Last Saturday afternoon I stopped by the center of the city and chatted with some long lost friends before having to rush off to work. I almost didn't go to this lovely social event to celebrate Earth Day, but I'm glad I did. It was nice to reunite with some folks I haven't seen in nearly ten years.
Aside from niceties, two of the things that surfaced the most for me on this Earth Day is the need for clean energy resilience and affordability. There was a group at this event, Ann Arbor for Public Power, who advocate for establishing a local public power utility that is owned by the city and not by one massive corporate power. A public utility would provide local control over a primary source of energy and subsequently strengthen community resilience.
I like this idea a lot. I wrote about it a bit in my Earth Day post on my Medium page. I'm not sure that I will still be living in this city by the time something like this finally happens, but even if I am not here and it does happen, it will be a good reference point when persuading other city leaders to establish similar initiatives. There is research to support that cities are gaining traction in accomplishing global sustainability and climate goals, with or without higher level support at state or national levels. City initiatives work.
Since I am a big fan of global to local paradigms, I will now connect this to my favorite set of international goals, the SDGs.
The sustainable development goals (SDGs) are a set of 17 ambitious goals designed to cover a lot of ground. I tend to reference two or more of them at a time to demonstrate how they are interlinked. I think SDGs 7 and 11 happily hang together; clean, affordable energy (SDG7) and sustainable cities and communities (SDG11) are obvious choices to advance progress on a more sustainable and climate friendly future.
In fact, New York City and Helsinki, Finland have developed their own system of reporting on the SDGs as a local voluntary review process (VLRs). These two cities are charting a path for how cities can meet the SDGs. Hopefully others will follow suit.
You can learn more about the SDGs on the United Nation's website and at the SDG Academy.
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© Dawn Nelson, 2022
