Is Toronto Green Enough? Seemingly Not!

Mercer Consulting distributes a Quality of Living city ranking report each year, this year being slightly different as it now contains a new chart called Eco-City Ranking. The new chart doesn't show Toronto in a good light unlike the remainder of the report that sees the Toronto quality of living being 16th in the whole world.

This chart recognized the finest cities in terms of water availability and drinkability, waste removal, quality of sewage systems, air pollution and traffic congestion. In other words, the top-notch cities produce minimal pollution and make use of maximum renewable resources. Toronto ranked 39th, overtaken not only by traditional green cities such as Oslo or Helsinki, but also by industrial cities for example Pittsburgh, Düsseldorf and Stuttgart. Narrowing the figures down somewhat, Toronto only came in 11th when comparing it to the North American cities. In joint 3rd place came Ottawa and Helsinki, then Honolulu came in second, but the award for the greatest eco-friendly city is awarded to Calgary. Two more Canadian cities came in better than Toronto and they were Montreal and Vancouver in 13th spot.

While in the light of our 16th place in overall ranking the Eco-City ranking may seem of negligible importance, we have to be mindful of the gap. When you look at quality of living, how the city deals with the environment is going to have an effect of those that settle there, which is pointed out by a senior researcher at Mercer.

The figures definitely show that our environmental quality of life is influencing our overall quality of life - not good.

Julie Kinnear has been local environmental activist and a MLS listing GTA specialist