Advising and counseling the company leaders on communications issues and opportunities.
Consulting with the company leadership on the development and implementation of communications strategies, plans, and programs.
Support the creation and management of the company human resources communications strategy.
The successful candidate must have a bachelors degree in Communications (or related) field and three (2) to five (5) years of experience.
Ability to work collaboratively with others – bringing a proven record of accomplishment as a professional communicator to the Company Marketing and Communication team .
Superior listening and consultative skills and eagerness to learn and contribute to positive organizational change .
Ability to work independently or as part of team.
Must have excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to build strong relationships with management & employees .
Must be a positive team player in a challenging and changing environment; includes working with a broad range and levels of personnel and clients.
Flexibility under competing time requirements and changing deadlines.
Excellent focus and a good sense of priorities.
We will provide the work placement/work permit (Visa) with our Corporate clients.
If you are interested by a suitable position in Communication area, please, send us a resume thru email.
Primary Duties:
• Prepare account reconciliations and analyze account variances.
• Assist finance staff as required with other month end tasks including ad-hoc reporting and analysis.
• Prepare journal entries with appropriate support.
• Assist with special operational projects as required.
Candidate will Report to Director of Finance Initiatives Position Requirements.
REQUIREMENT:
1 – 2 years of related finance and accounting experience
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills and ability to work with Finance Managers and other department Managers
• Detail oriented with sound analytical skills
* Ability to work with confidentiality, diplomacy and discretion
• Is a self-starter with ability to balance multiple tasks in the face of competing priorities.
• Ability to speak and write fluently in English
• Proficient in Microsoft Office applications.
Attractive salaries and packages (including life insurance, paid vacation,….).
We will provide the work placement/work permit (Visa) with our Corporate clients.
If you are interested by a suitable position in Finance/Banking area, please, send us a resume thru email.
Skill Absence management,Core HR, NA Payroll, Compensation, Benefits, T&L
Location Jersey City, NJ
Total Experience 4 yrs.
Max Salary $ DOE Per Hour
Employment Type Contract Jobs (Temp/Consulting)
Job Duration 3+ Months
Domain Any
Prepare marketing plans
· Review, Implement and evaluate marketing systems
· Advertising campaign using proposed budget
· Make sure Market Segmentation is done and all relevant clients are contacted
* Assists in research and development of markets for pricing, competitive products, etc. Includes possible travel
* Compiles and produces sales and marketing reports
* Identifies and analyzes potential new product opportunities
* Assists in all levels of product development
* Creates and implements product testing procedures
* Assists in coordinating marketing functions and work on site if needed
* Generates and maintain spec sheets, bill of material, etc
* Handles vendor relations and handles other duties as assigned.
Skill required:
Bachelor's degree or equivalent with emphasis in marketing. (Advanced degree preferred.)
Ability to comprehend technical information
Extreme drive and willingness to learn new information.
Positive attitude and ability to accept constructive criticism.
Good project management, organizational, interpersonal, analytical, and presentation skills.
We will provide the work placement/work permit (Visa) with our Corporate clients.
If you are interested by a suitable position in Marketing area, please, send us a resume thru email.
ILO, Better Work Vietnam /Ho Chi Minh City, N/A, Viet Nam
The International Labour Organization (ILO) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) are recruiting a Country Programme Manager responsible for managing all aspects of the Better Work Vietnam programme. The position is based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and is United Nations grade P5 with an ILO contract.
The programme
Better Work is a unique partnership between the ILO and the IFC that unites the expertise of the ILO in labour standards with that of IFC in private sector development. By 2017, Better Work will have improved the lives of at least three million workers and millions more of their family members. It will achieve this by driving sector-wide, sustainable improvement in adherence to national labour law and core labour standards, and strengthening business competitiveness in major garment producing countries
In Vietnam, Better Work aims to work in over 500 apparel and footwear factories across the country over the coming four years. The programme brings together local enterprises, international buyers, governments, workers’ and employers’ organizations to create shared and sustainable solutions. For more information see www.betterwork.org.
The Country Manager will be responsible for oversight of all aspects of the Better Work Vietnam program, including planned geographic and spectral expansion, high level and strategic engagement with national and international stakeholders including the ILO and IFC, and implementation of plans to create an independent, self financing local entity within 4 years.
Management
The position reports to the Global Operations Manager in Bangkok and works under the direction of the Better Work Director in Geneva.
Education
Advanced university degree in adult education, international development or other relevant field or equivalent in experience.
Experience and languages
At least ten years of professional experience in social dialogue, working with the private sector in developing countries, corporate social responsibility (particularly in the field of labour standards compliance), capacity building, project management or related fields in a senior level position, at least five years of which has been at the international level. Relevant experience working in Asia would be an advantage. Excellent English is required. A working knowledge of Vietnamese and/or Chinese and/or Korean would be an advantage.
For further information and details on how to apply, please visit http://bit.ly/14QS08l
Closing date
21 April 2013.
When Zach Pickens first started gardening on his New York rooftop six years ago, he learned the hard way that growing plants in an urban environment isn’t the same as tending them in a suburban backyard. “The first year was really terrible,” he says. But he welcomed the challenge, and his struggles prompted him to learn more about the science of gardening — microclimates, ecosystems, seed development.
Seed saving — the practice of collecting the seeds of naturally reproducing plants to be used again from year to year — particularly intrigued him. “I got interested first and foremost because it was saving me money. I’d save my own seed and didn’t have to buy [more] next year,” Pickens says. As he immersed himself in New York’s urban-gardening culture, he started to see seed saving’s potential to help the movement thrive, and wanted to spread the word.
Pickens noticed that if he saved the seed of the season’s healthiest plants, next year’s crop would be even better — he was essentially selecting for whatever traits helped his veggies grow best in containers on the roof. Before Monsanto and other corporate giants began pushing patented seeds that didn’t reproduce, forcing farmers to buy new seed every year, seed saving was a common practice that not only saved growers money but produced hardier plants, as the varieties selected year after year adapted to local conditions. By saving seed, Pickens can home in on plants that thrive in the hyper-local conditions unique to the big city.
Okra, for example, takes advantage of the urban heat island effect, in which all that concrete and asphalt absorbs the day’s heat, making New York City toastier than nearby rural communities. “In the city we can grow okra pretty well because it stays so warm through the night,” Pickens explains. “The okra loves it.” Plus, the dwarf variety Pickens favors only grows about three feet tall, perfect for containers.
Bloomsdale spinach, a curly-leaf variety, works well for the opposite reason — it can withstand cold and survive the winter. This spinach didn’t thrive at first: “It took about two or three generations from the seed I started with to get it to produce well,” Pickens says. “That’s my example of something that really struggled for the first generation.”
Chrissa Yee
Pickens, who holds a day job as farm manager for Manhattan’s Riverpark Farm, started Rooftop Ready Seeds in 2010, selling his specialized seeds less out of financial motivation and more out of concern for the greater urban-gardening good. He’s a “big supporter of getting as many people gardening and farming in the city as possible,” Pickens says. “If people buy my seeds and they have more success in their garden than otherwise, that’s good for everybody.”
He started with five seed varieties on offer at a Williamsburg garden store. The first 50 packs he brought in sold out within a week, and the store owner — with whom Pickens split the revenue 50-50 — called asking if he had more. “That was really my sign to ramp it up,” he said. The next year, he had access to two rooftop gardens in addition to his own — ones he maintained in return for the ability to save seed there. This year, Pickens is selling 25 seed varieties from the Brooklyn Grange farm stand and online. In exchange for helping with the grange’s own seed-saving efforts, he gets to select some of its seeds for his stock.
Saving seed is an ancient but tricky art. Once you’ve chosen the plant whose seed you want to save, you have to isolate it from others to avoid cross-pollination. Letting a plant go to seed also means you won’t get to harvest it at its prime — though Pickens says he tries to be resourceful by making sauces and spreads from some gone-to-seed plants (like tomatoes). Then there’s the often-painstaking process of drying the seed, opening it (“flailing”), and separating the chaff (“threshing”). Pickens does all this in winter, when the pace at Riverpark Farm is slower.
Given its decidedly scrappy ethos, is Rooftop Ready a reference to the name of Monsanto’s infamous Roundup Ready seeds? “What I’m worried about is a lawyer asking me that question,” Pickens laughs. “I absolutely didn’t plan on it being a play on Roundup Ready. But if you really want to get into it, yeah, it is in direct opposition to [Monsanto’s] way of producing seed.”
Monsanto’s practice of patenting its seeds — and going after farmers who violate those patents, sometimes as a result of unintentional cross-pollination — is, indeed, a direct contradiction to the seed-saving mindset, which is all about preserving heritage varieties and freeing growers from the control of big agribusiness.
“[Rooftop Ready] may be a business, but that seed is open-pollinated,” Pickens says. “If you wanted to, you could buy all [my varieties], grow them out, and save the seeds.” In other words, he’s not interested in making gardeners rely on his seeds like conventional farmers do on Monsanto’s, but rather on increasing the self-sufficiency of all growers.
Which is more important than ever now, as climate change disrupts weather patterns and shiftsgrowingzones. “That’s the argument for biodiversity; that’s the argument for not planting monocrops,” Pickens says. “You might find out that that’s the one crop that can’t stand up to particular conditions.”
Even as Rooftop Ready grows as a business, Pickens’ enthusiasm reveals the venture as a labor of love, one still rooted in his zeal for learning about the scientific processes that make plants grow and reproduce. He hopes to experiment more with cross-breeding to find the best varieties possible, cross-pollinating the plants with the most desirable traits.
The work, he says, is “like a scientist’s playground.”
Watch Pickens give a quick explanation of seed saving at Riverpark Farm:
Of course, it’s an easy city to pick on. The nation’s 13th largest metropolitan area (nudging out Detroit) crams 4.3 million people into a low bowl in a hot desert, where horrific heat waves and windstorms visit it regularly. It snuggles next to the nation’s largest nuclear plant and, having exhausted local sources, it depends on an improbable infrastructure to suck water from the distant (and dwindling) Colorado River.
In Phoenix, you don’t ask: What could go wrong? You ask: What couldn’t?
And that’s the point, really. Phoenix’s multiple vulnerabilities, which are plenty daunting taken one by one, have the capacity to magnify one another, like compounding illnesses. In this regard, it’s a quintessentially modern city, a pyramid of complexities requiring large energy inputs to keep the whole apparatus humming. The urban disasters of our time — New Orleans hit by Katrina, New York City swamped by Sandy — may arise from single storms, but the damage they do is the result of a chain reaction of failures — grids going down, levees failing, backup systems not backing up. As you might expect, academics have come up with a name for such breakdowns: infrastructure failure interdependencies. You wouldn’t want to use it in a poem, but it does catch an emerging theme of our time.
Phoenix’s pyramid of complexities looks shakier than most because it stands squarely in the crosshairs of climate change. The area, like much of the rest of the American Southwest, is already hot and dry; it’s getting ever hotter and drier, and is increasingly battered by powerful storms. Sandy and Katrina previewed how coastal cities can expect to fare as seas rise and storms strengthen. Phoenix pulls back the curtain on the future of inland empires. If you want a taste of the brutal new climate to come, the place to look is where that climate is already harsh, and growing more so — the aptly named Valley of the Sun.
In Phoenix, it’s the convergence of heat, drought, and violent winds, interacting and amplifying each other, that you worry about. Generally speaking, in contemporary society, nothing that matters happens for just one reason, and in Phoenix there are all too many “reasons” primed to collaborate and produce big problems, with climate change foremost among them, juicing up the heat, the drought, and the wind to ever greater extremes, like so many sluggers on steroids. Notably, each of these nemeses, in its own way, has the potential to undermine the sine qua non of modern urban life, the electrical grid, which in Phoenix merits special attention.
If, in summer, the grid there fails on a large scale and for a significant period of time, the fallout will make the consequences of Superstorm Sandy look mild. Sure, people will hunt madly for power outlets to charge their cellphones and struggle to keep their milk fresh, but communications and food refrigeration will not top their list of priorities. Phoenix is an air-conditioned city. If the power goes out, people fry.
In the summer of 2003, a heat wave swept Europe and killed 70,000 people. The temperature in London touched 100 degrees F for the first time since records had been kept, and in portions of France the mercury climbed as high as 104 degrees F. Those temperatures, however, are child’s play in Phoenix, where readings commonly exceed 100 degrees F for more than 100 days a year. In 2011, the city set a new record for days over 110 degrees F: There were 33 of them, more than a month of spectacularly superheated days ushering in a new era.
In flight from the sun
It goes without saying that Phoenix’s desert setting is hot by nature, but we’ve made it hotter. The city is a masonry world, with asphalt and concrete everywhere. The hard, heavy materials of its buildings and roads absorb heat efficiently and give it back more slowly than the naked land. In a sense, the whole city is really a thermal battery, soaking up energy by day and releasing it at night. The result is an “urban heat island,” which, in turn, prevents the cool of the desert night from providing much relief.
Sixty years ago, when Phoenix was just embarking on its career of manic growth, nighttime lows never crept above 90 degrees F. Today such temperatures are commonplace, and the vigil has begun for the first night that doesn’t dip below 100 degrees F. Studies indicate that Phoenix’s urban-heat-island effect may boost nighttime temperatures [PDF] by as much as 10 degrees F. It’s as though the city has doubled down on climate change, finding a way to magnify its most unwanted effects even before it hits the rest of us full blast.
Predictably, the poor suffer most from the heat. They live in the hottest neighborhoods with the least greenery to mitigate the heat-island effect, and they possess the fewest resources for combating high temperatures. For most Phoenicians, however, none of this is more than an inconvenience as long as the AC keeps humming and the utility bill gets paid. When the heat intensifies, they learn to scurry from building to car and into the next building, essentially holding their breath. In those cars, the second thing they touch after the ignition is the fan control for the AC. The steering wheel comes later.
In the blazing brilliance of July and August, you venture out undefended to walk or run only in the half-light of dawn or dusk. The idea for residents of the Valley of the Sun is to learn to dodge the heat, not challenge it.
Heat, however, is a tricky adversary. It stresses everything, including electrical equipment. Transformers, when they get too hot, can fail. Likewise, thermoelectric generating stations, whether fired by coal, gas, or neutrons, become less efficient [PDF] as the mercury soars. And the great hydroelectric dams of the Colorado River, including Glen Canyon, which serves greater Phoenix, won’t be able to supply the “peaking power” they do now if the reservoirs behind them are fatally shrunken by drought, as multiple studies forecast they will be. Much of this can be mitigated with upgraded equipment, smart grid technologies, and redundant systems. But then along comes the haboob.
A haboob is a dust/sand/windstorm, usually caused by the collapse of a thunderstorm cell. The plunging air hits the ground and roils outward, picking up debris across the open desert. As the Arabic name suggests, such storms are native to arid regions, but — although Phoenix is no stranger to storm-driven dust — the term haboob has only lately entered the local lexicon. It seems to have been imported to describe a new class of storms, spectacular in their vehemence, which bring visibility to zero and life to a standstill. They sandblast cars, close the airport, and occasionally cause the lights — and AC — to go out. Not to worry, say the two major utilities serving the Phoenix metroplex, Arizona Public Service and the Salt River Project. And the outages have indeed been brief. So far.
Before Katrina hit, the Army Corps of Engineers was similarly reassuring to the people of New Orleans. And until Superstorm Sandy landed, almost no one worried about storm surges filling the subway tunnels of New York.
Every system, like every city, has its vulnerabilities. Climate change, in almost every instance, will worsen them. The beefed-up, juiced-up, greenhouse-gassed, overheated weather of the future will give us haboobs of a sort we can’t yet imagine, packed with ever greater amounts of energy. In all likelihood, the emergence of such storms as a feature of Phoenix life results from an overheating environment, abetted by the loose sand and dust of abandoned farmland (which dried up when water was diverted to the city’s growing subdivisions).
Water, water, everywhere (but not for long)
In dystopic portraits of Phoenix’s unsustainable future, water — or rather the lack of it — is usually painted as the agent of collapse. Indeed, the metropolitan area, a jumble of jurisdictions that includes Scottsdale, Glendale, Tempe, Mesa, Sun City, Chandler, and 15 other municipalities, long ago made full use of such local rivers as the Salt, Verde, and Gila. Next, people sank wells and mined enough groundwater to lower the water table by 400 feet.
Sometimes the land sank, too. Near some wells it subsided by 10 feet or more. All along, everyone knew that the furious extraction of groundwater couldn’t last, so they fixed their hopes on a new bonanza called the Central Arizona Project (CAP), a river-sized, open-air canal supported by an elaborate array of pumps, siphons, and tunnels that would bring Colorado River water across the breadth of Arizona to Phoenix and Tucson.
The CAP came on line in the early 1990s and today is the engine of Arizona’s growth. Unfortunately, in order to win authorization and funding to build it, state officials had to make a bargain with the devil, which in this case turned out to be California. Arizona’s delegation in the House of Representatives was tiny, California’s was huge, and its representatives jealously protected their longstanding stranglehold on the Colorado River. The concession California forced on Arizona was simple: It had to agree that its CAP water rights would take second place to California’s claims.
This means one thing: Once the inevitable day comes when there isn’t enough water to go around, the CAP will absorb the shortage down to the last drop before California even begins to turn off its faucets.
A raw deal for Arizona? You bet, but not exactly the end of the line. Arizona has other “more senior” rights to the Colorado, and when the CAP begins to run dry, you may be sure that the masters of the CAP will pay whatever is necessary to lease those older rights and keep the 330-mile canal flowing. Among their targets will be water rights belonging to Indian tribes at the western edge of the state along the lower reaches of the river. The cost of buying tribal water will drive the rates consumers pay for water in Phoenix sky-high, but they’ll pay it because they’ll have to.
Longer term, the Colorado River poses issues that no amount of tribal water can resolve. Beset by climate change, overuse, and drought, the river and its reservoirs, according to various researchers, may decline [PDF] to the point that water fails to pass Hoover Dam. In that case, the CAP would dry up, but so would the Colorado Aqueduct which serves greater Los Angeles and San Diego, as well as the All-American Canal, on which the factory farms of California’s Imperial and Coachella valleys depend. Irrigators and municipalities downstream in Mexico would also go dry. If nothing changes in the current order of things, it is expected that the possibility of such a debacle could loom in little more than a decade.
The preferred solution to this crisis among the water mavens of the lower Colorado is augmentation, which means importing more water into the Colorado system to boost native supplies. A recently discussed grandiose scheme to bail out the Colorado’s users with a pipeline from the Mississippi River failed to pass the straight-face test and was shot down by then-Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar.
Meanwhile, the obvious expedient of cutting back on water consumption finds little support in thirsty California, which will watch the CAP go dry before it gets serious about meaningful system-wide conservation.
Burning uplands
Phoenicians who want to escape water worries, heat waves, and haboobs have traditionally sought refuge in the cool green forests of Arizona’s uplands, or at least they did until recently. In 2002, the Rodeo-Chediski fire consumed 469,000 acres of pine and mixed conifer on the Mogollon Rim, not far from Phoenix. It was an ecological holocaust that no one expected to see surpassed. Only nine years later, in 2011, the Wallow fire picked up the torch, so to speak, and burned across the Rim all the way to the New Mexico border and beyond, topping out at 538,000 charred acres.
Now, nobody thinks such fires are one-off flukes. Diligent modeling of forest response to rising temperatures and increased moisture stress suggests, in fact, that these two fires were harbingers of worse to come. By mid-century, according to a paper by an A team of Southwestern forest ecologists, the “normal” stress on trees will equal that of the worst megadroughts in the region’s distant paleohistory, when most of the trees in the area simply died.
Compared to Phoenix’s other heat and water woes, the demise of Arizona’s forests may seem like a side issue, whose effects would be noticeable mainly in the siltation of reservoirs and the destabilization of the watersheds on which the city depends. But it could well prove a regional disaster. Consider, then, heat, drought, windstorms, and fire as the four horsemen of Phoenix’s Apocalypse. As it happens, though, this potential apocalypse has a fifth horseman as well.
Rebecca Solnit has written eloquently of the way a sudden catastrophe — an earthquake, hurricane, or tornado — can dissolve social divisions and cause a community to cohere, bringing out the best in its citizenry. Drought and heat waves are different. You don’t know that they have taken hold until you are already in them, and you never know when they will end. The unpleasantness eats away at you. It corrodes your state of mind. You have lots of time to meditate on the deficiencies of your neighbors, which loom larger the longer the crisis goes on.
Drought divides people, and Phoenix is already a divided place — notoriously so, thanks to the brutal antics of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. In Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City, Andrew Ross offers a dismal portrait of contemporary Phoenix — of a city threatened by its particular brand of local politics and economic domination, shaped by more than the usual quotient of prejudice, greed, class insularity, and devotion to raw power.
It is a truism that communities that do not pull together fail to surmount their challenges. Phoenix’s are as daunting as any faced by an American city in the new age of climate change, but its winner-take-all politics (out of which has come Arizona’s flagrantly repressive anti-immigration law), combined with the fragmentation of the metro area into nearly two dozen competing jurisdictions, essentially guarantee that, when the worst of times hit, common action and shared sacrifice will remain as insubstantial as a desert mirage. When one day the U-Haul vans all point away from town and the people of the Valley of the Sun clog the interstates heading for greener, wetter pastures, more than the brutal heat of a new climate paradigm will be driving them away. The breakdown of cooperation and connectedness will spur them along, too.
One day, some of them may look back and think of the real estate crash of 2007-2008 and the recession that followed with fond nostalgia. The city’s economy was in the tank, growth had stalled, and for a while business-as-usual had nothing usual about it. But there was a rare kind of potential. That recession might have been the last best chance for Phoenix and other go-go Sunbelt cities to reassess their lamentably unsustainable habits and re-organize themselves, politically and economically, to get ready for life on the front burner of climate change. Land use, transportation, water policies, building codes, growth management — you name it — might all have experienced a healthy overhaul. It was a chance no one took. Instead, one or several decades from now, people will bet on a surer thing: They’ll take the road out of town.
Assist GM in project coordination.
Manage projects throughout their complete lifecycle.
Milestone setup and maintain project schedule/check list.
Coordinate within own division, between other divisions and project team members for project status reviews and reports
Compile concept, presentation and project reports for tracking.
Conduct analysis and evaluate improvement measurement of current projects.
University degree holder with 2-3 years relevant experience in project management.
Proficient PC knowledge in Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint.
Strong organization skill with an analytical mind.
Attention to details with excellent quality and accuracy.
Team-player with good communication skills.
Excellent written and spoken English.
We will provide the work placement/work permit (Visa) with our Corporate clients.
If you are interested by a suitable position in Project area, please, send us a resume thru email.
Last month, standing at the Old Capitol Pump House, a restored building along the Anacostia River, Washington, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray announced the launch of the long-awaited Sustainable D.C. plan. The result of an amazing public outreach process that involved over 400 local green experts, more than 180 public meetings involving 5,000 people, and 15 D.C. government departments and agencies, the plan is an attempt to make “D.C. the greenest, healthiest, and most livable city in the U.S.” by 2032. Less than two weeks after the announcement, drastic, across-the-board federal funding cuts kicked in, throwing the whole plan into question.
At the unveiling February 20, Gray said D.C. already leads the nation in the number of green, healthy buildings buildings, per capita. New schools must now reach the LEED Gold standard. The district has signed on to the National Better Buildings challenge, aiming for 20 percent energy efficiency improvements across all buildings by 2020. And with the Sustainable DC Act of 2012 now signed into law, a new Property Assessment Clean Energy (PACE) program is underway, aimed at improving financing opportunities for greening commercial and multi-family housing.
The district wants to be greener looking, too. There’s an accelerated tree planting campaign, with 6,400 slated to be planted this season alone. The goal is a tree canopy that covers 40 percent of the city’s surface, which would put D.C. in the top tier of major cities worldwide. Beyond trees, the city is implementing “high standard stormwater infrastructure investments.” According to the mayor, 1.5 million square feet if green roofs are already in place. Green streets, like the first green alley built in Ward 7, are also being rolled out, with more potentially coming soon in Chinatown. Green infrastructure technologies may get a local boost, too, with the $4.5 million that has been dedicated to “innovative pilot projects.”
The district already has the biggest bike share network in the U.S. The D.C. government now purchases 100 percent renewable energy, earning it designation as a “number-one green power community” from the Environmental Protection Agency. All of this action has led to a 12 percent reduction in green house gas emissions over the past year.
Gray seemed to stress, however, that going green can’t just be the agenda of educated, liberal, white environmentalists. The diverse, multi-ethnic crowd seemed to underpin this point. “We need to focus on jobs, health, equity, and diversity, and the climate,” he said So part of making D.C. more sustainable will involve “expanding access to affordable housing and economic development opportunities” for all, so that “we have one city.” Gray said: “We can’t push people out.”
The actual plan offers some 32 goals, 31 targets, and more than 140 proposed actions. Some goals are quite bold, like creating “a fishable, swimmable Anacostia River in a generation.” The Anacostia is currently one of the filthiest rivers in the U.S. Other goals: Divert 80 percent of the city’s waste from the landfill. Expand urban agriculture with 20 more acres of land growing food, so that 75 percent of residents are within 1/4 mile of healthy, local produce. The city also wants 1,000 new local renewable energy projects, with a dedicated wind farm for D.C. government operations.
But, as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. At the launcg event, media representatives asked pointed questions about whether the mayor and city council will actually put the funds and government personnel behind this bold plan to “change our society.” In a telling comment, Gray said the District would need to wait to hear the results of the debate in Congress on “sequestration” – the drastic, across-the-board budget cuts that would go into effect just over a week later if Congress and the President couldn’t come to a compromise.
Now that sequestration is here, the future of the sustainability effort, and many other things in Washington, are up in the air. Much of the district economy depends on federal government spending. Much of the resurgence of the district in the past few years can be attributed to the new federal money pumped into the district (see a great New York Times article on this).
In his recent state of the district speech, Gray said the city must “diversify” into new sectors. Sustainable DC will help the district’s economy and people become more resilient to economic, environmental, and social shocks, and diversify into greener industries. This seems like smart local leadership that goes beyond the vagaries of federal spending.
Still, it will be up to the D.C. government, private sector, and non-profit organizations to implement the plan at a very high standard. The race is on, considering many other top-tier cities have similar goals. Here’s hoping the antics at the national level don’t torpedo the plan just as it’s gaining speed.
Confidential/New York city, NY
Confidential/New York city, NY
Confidential/Jersey city, NJ
Forum for the Future/London, London, City of, United Kingdom
ILO, Better Work Vietnam /Ho Chi Minh City, N/A, Viet Nam
Confidential/Jersey city, NJ
