48. One Planet Councils

Today, I attended a presentation and discussion on One Planet Councils, which is based on the One Planet Living framework developed by BioRegional and WWF. It sets out 10 principles for sustainability and provides a very understandable metric - we have one planet, so we need to live within its capacity. If everyone in the world consumed as many natural resources as the average person in Australia we would need four planets to support us. This is clearly unsustainable! One Planet Councils allows Australian local governments to assess their sustainability programs against this simple concept - do we consume more or less than our share of one planet's worth of resources? Ironbark Sustainability has teamed up with  One Planet Living, BioRegional, and the Victorian Local Governance Association to introduce One Planet Councils within Australia. The session highlighted three rather interesting points for me. First, applying One Planet Living to neighbourhoods has significant positive health impacts for residents, predominantly related to using cars less and walking more as well as healthy eating and lifestyles. With health problems and assocaited costs rising in many industrialised countries, the planning of our cities may well become a key approach to tackling this issue. Second, major property developers are now seriously looking at applying One Planet Living across their developments as the benefits associated with lower energy and transport costs as well as a better quality of life are highly valued by customers. Third, some retail stores are applying One Planet Living in their product lines, including what is called "choice editing" when a company removes certain products from its stores, which are identified as not being consistent with One Planet Living. These are all exciting developments!