Richard Wright

Senior Land Aquisition @Wright Eco Energy

A versatile Sustainability and Service Delivery Consultant. Sustainability requires radicalism, in its true meaning, to ensure that the way we live and go about living is indeed regenerative and renewable. Working as a thinker in residence for the group, I proposed linking policies to reduce urban eco-footprints and resource use with the challenge of building a green economy globallyThe rapidly urbanizing world we currently live in represents a fundamental, systemic change in the relationship between humans and nature. The move from living in villages and small towns to cities of millions of people is driven, to a significant extent, by the possibility of easy access to fossil fuel energy. The resource consumption patterns of urban populations define human environmental impact as never before and this has grave consequences for the health of the biosphere and the balance of gases in the atmosphere.As cities become the predominant human habitat, urban development needs to undergo a profound paradigm shift. We must find ways for cities to minimize their systemic dependence on fossil fuels and their inefficient, unsustainable use of resources. The ecological, economic, and social externalities of our urban systems, in particular, need to be assessed and addressed in new ways. Rapid moves toward making our cities much more energy efficient and powering them with renewable energy are often cited as a crucially important issues, but we need to go beyond that: huge efforts must be made to enable cities to develop regenerative relationships with the world’s ecosystems.