Clover Moore’s carbon accounting needs to be put under the microscope, writes Peter Robinson, director at Sustainable Urbanism, in a letter to the editor...

Clover Moore's recent claim of a 70 per cent reduction in carbon for ALL of Sydney city is sadly, misleading. It would seem that Clover and her team have not looked at international best practice, where entire cities have been audited with comprehensive strategies for carbon reduction put in place. These cities readily admit how hard it is to reduce to carbon when you have to take into account all emissions that a city causes, directly and indirectly.? ?Thus, has Clover’s team taken into account all traffic generated by the city and its occupants? All air traffic trips generated by the city and its occupants? All shipping emissions generated by the city and its occupants? I don’t think so. Yet the city is the cause of these emissions. Not to take them into account is misleading and simply back-passing.

It would seem that the City of Sydney’s carbon accounting method and the actual carbon accounting has not been made public, and therefore the inclusions and exclusions cannot be assessed or verified. In fact, it is strange that the City has not clearly shown how they have audited carbon emissions, as this is critical to their assumptions for reductions. In following leading cities, one will discover that the auditing method is greatly debated, publicly and professionally. So, Clover, it must be asked: What do you have to hide? Or is there, in fact, no real carbon audit?

The amounts to be reduced, and how they are to be reduced, would seem to be loose estimates on techniques that rely on a massive paradigm shift in infrastructure provision. There is no evidence that any initial work is being done on how to radically change infrastructure, and what the feasibility is. Given that any city is made up of many parties who all work to one end or another to make what we know as a city, it is important that it is made clear who all the parties involved are.

That brings up the question whether there have been any cost-benefit studies done or feasibility studies done for the carbon reduction initiatives. Has anything been costed? Is it feasible?

One of the world leaders in municipal carbon reduction, Mr Monninghoff from Germany will be in Australia on a speaking tour in October. The City of Sydney was approached to see if it was interested in meeting him, and potentially have him speak publically about international best practice. This would have enabled Sydney and its public to hear the comprehensive and thorough techniques and methods that his city has used to reduce carbon. He can certainly tell you how hard it is when you comprehensively include all carbon sources. However, the City has shown it is not interested in supporting the trip of this highly regarded visitor. So it must be questioned whether the City is interested in improving its plan and ideas at all.?

Equally, the City’s Sustainable Sydney 2030 strategy has no spatial intelligence in its placement of uses or projects. This is of major concern, as there are quantifiable benefits coming from locational efficiency in planning, in particular in regard to sustainability. Without this approach, the entire strategy is questionable as to whether it really is a sustainable city plan at all. Thus the claim that Sustainable Sydney 2030 is sustainable city-wide planning would seem to just political spin and hot air. Intelligent design comes as a result of locational efficiency, and without locational efficiency it is nothing more than potentially good design in the wrong the place, which can sometimes result in increased carbon emissions.

So it is depressing to read about how the City of Sydney’s planning approach could help cities around Australia. Planning based on false and incorrect assumptions is the wrong way to go. I note that there are some good ideas in 2030, which must be acknowledged, but there is a missing foundation of good carbon auditing, and an intelligent spatial approach to locational efficiency. Without these, 2030 is just a set of some good ideas that may be built but may not work, and are not framed in a way to create a genuinely sustainable city.

Editor's note: Architecture & Design posed Peter Robinson's questions to the City of Sydney's media office but unfortunately the City declined to comment.