HappyLifestyleJournal
Recently, drawn by the quality of life that cities provide, many people have been migrating from the country side. This mass migration leads to overcrowding in the cities, which has a negative effect on the environment, since with more people comes more traffic, more buildings, more parking lots in the places where trees and green surfaces used to be. However, there are cities that are working towards solving these problems and taking action to preserve the environment. Here, 13 of the world’s greenest cities will be listed and described, and those cities are:
1. Stockholm
Stockholm is the capital of Sweden, and with a population of 2,163,042 it stands for one of the most inhabited cities in the world, which makes it challenging to sustain the environment that is characterized by functionality, quality and biological diversity.
Stockholm was the first city in Europe to receive the European Green Capital award (in 2010) given by the EU Commission, thus becoming a role model for environmental standards. The reasons why Stockholm was the city to be chosen for this award were the facts that the city had such a system that considered environmental aspects when planning budgets and operations. Besides that, while the pollution in many cities rises by the day, Stockholm has reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 25% per capita during the last decade. The city has also made a goal to completely stop using fossil fuels by 2050. Another amazing fact about Stockholm is that a whopping 99% of all household waste is recycled or used to generate energy, and the percentage of incorrectly recycled waste has been significantly reduced.
The main goals that the Stockholm’s Environment Program revolves around are to achieve a more environmentally efficient transport, to make sure that goods and buildings are free of dangerous substances, to discover ways for a more sustainable use of energy, land and water, and to deal with waste in a way that doesn’t have a negative impact on the environment.
