Unlocking City Success: Measuring Systems for Progress
WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities
Helping cities make big ideas happen. Project of World Resources Institute. Producer of TheCityFix.com
Cities need to transform for the world to hit climate and development goals like the Paris Agreement and Sustainable Development Goals. Yet cities are incredibly complex – systems of systems – and differ widely from place to place. How can we measure success???
Cities are constantly changing, have very different resources from one another, and serve as loci of deeply interconnected networks of people, services and economic activity. Choosing common targets is a big political challenge and measuring something useful across all cities is an enormous data challenge.?
The Systems Change Lab is one way WRI and partners are working to answer these questions. This week, we launched the cities system, a data dashboard to measure global progress across nearly 20 indicators split across three transformational shifts needed in cities to protect people and the planet. It also includes indicators measuring enablers and barriers to achieve these changes.??
To reach a sustainable path by 2050, cities need to:?
Additional updates will be added to the dashboard to improve data coverage in the coming months. Despite the complexity of measuring progress across urban areas, these tools and common targets are critical to focus resources on the big challenges facing people in cities today.?
- Rogier van den Berg Global Director, WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities
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