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For the first time, Mercer consulting distributed its once a year Quality of Living city ranking, with a new brand new chart included, called Eco-City Ranking. In the main report Toronto faired fairly well, ranking 16th in the world and 3rd in North America, sadly this good news doesn't carry on, as the new chart clearly shows. The chart is built on a number of areas like water availability, how good the sewage systems are and air pollution. So to be classed as eco friendly then the city would have to have restricted pollution and maximize it's renewable materials. Although we would expect the green cities such a Oslo to rate highly, we wouldn't have assumed industrial cities such as Stuttgart to be more eco-friendly than Toronto, but they are! Toronto did not score very well even among North American cities, coming in 11th place. A few Canadian cities do however score well - Ottawa was in joint place for 3rd along with Helsinki, Honolulo 2nd and first place goes to Canada with Calgary being named the highest eco-friendly city. Montreal and Vancouver came in side by side in 13th position. Although the figures for general quality of living may be okay, the figures for the eco-city push us down to 16th place, consequently we need to do something about the eco-friendliness of Toronto. As Slagin Parakatil, Senior Researcher at Mercer, commented: "A city’s eco-status or attitude toward sustainability can have significant impact on the quality of living of its inhabitants". The figures clearly show that our environmental quality of life is impinging on our overall quality of life - not good. Julie Kinnear is local green activist and a MLS Toronto realtor
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