London relies on a wide range of resources - material, human, financial
Key world ‘resources’ are minerals, ores, fossil fuels and biomass. Resource efficiency requires us to consider how these resources can be used to the minimum possible extent whilst still producing ‘enough’ of the outputs (goods and services) that London requires - “doing more with less”.
Improving the rate of resource efficiency faster than the economic growth rate is the notion behind decoupling, described in a report from the United Nations Environment Programme. It demands an urgent rethink of the links between resource use and economic prosperity, buttressed by a massive investment in technological, financial and social innovation, to at least freeze per capita consumption in wealthy countries and help developing nations follow a more sustainable path. This is essential because currently developed countries' citizens consume an average of 16 tons of key resources per capita (ranging up to 40 or more tons per person in some developed countries). By comparison, the average person in India today consumes four tons per year. With the growth of both population and prosperity, especially in developing countries, the prospect of much higher resource consumption levels is “far beyond what is likely sustainable”, the report says.
When thinking about a sustainable London, however, there are further resources with which we are concerned:
Land - land is a key resource, without which little or no economic or social activity can take place. London‘s land resources are, necessarily, finite and restricted, and the effective use of this land is central to its operation as a city. What is the ’best' balance between the competing allocations of land?
The spatial development strategy for London is the vehicle designed to address this question, to balance the needs of housing and open space, of industrial and office uses, of retail and transport and waterways and so forth. London's long and complex history dictates many of the parameters within which the London Plan must operate - but is this history a weight that restricts the development of a sustainable city?
Human - in a poetic sense the city is the accumulation of generations of effort from our predecessors, human energy embodied in the buildings and institutions that comprise this extraordinary city. What would it mean to ask the question: are we deploying our human resources efficiently? Are we steering our collective efforts in a direction that is consistent with a sustainable city? The future evidence of our efforts will take the form of the buildings and institutions we leave behind: which is more important, the level of our efficiency or the nature of our results?
Institutional - we inherit institutional resources, then modify them to suit our current ends. Our institutions operate with more or less efficiency: do they achieve the outputs or outcomes we require with a low or falling input? The current wave of public spending cuts will certainly reveal much by way of answer to this question; and we might argue, too, that the pressures of competition ensure that our private sector institutions are forced to be efficient. Perhaps the question is wrong: perhaps we should be clearer about what it is we are expecting from our institutions, and then asking whether the institutions are capable of delivering those objectives.
Intellectual - do we have sufficient knowledge, insight and understanding even to know what our objectives ought to be? Every question of sustainability seems to throw up some conflict between competing objectives; or we discover that what seemed to be a sustainable solution contains within it some unsustainable Trojan result.
We have heard much in the past couple of decades about the ‘knowledge economy’; and there seems little doubt that London has a powerful concentration of academic and other institutions in which considerable intellectual resources are housed. Are they good enough? Are they fit for purpose? Are we using these capabilities in a manner that is consistent with the challenges of climate change, injustice and economic misery with which we are confronted?
Financial - if there is one thing that London certainly seems to have lot of, it‘s money. London is one of the world’s leading financial centres; it provides homes to many of the world's wealthiest people; it offers the opportunity to shoppers from all over the world to buy the most expensive items money can buy; it has average house prices dramatically higher than anywhere else in the UK, and so on and so forth.
It also, of course, has a widening gap between the rich and the poor, the highest levels of child poverty in western Europe, hundreds of thousands of people who cannot afford to buy a home, and so on and so forth. Are London‘s financial resources being used ’efficiently‘? Or ’well‘? Is a more sustainable London one in which the city’s financial resources are - for example - more under the control of communities rather than disembodied institutions? Or where more resources are in the hands of the weakest in society rather than the privileged elite?
