Green Economy | Secure Vancouver's
international reputation as a mecca of
green enterprise
2020 Target
Double the number of
green jobs by 2020.
Today
Vancouver has a highly diversified home-grown green economy. This sector employs residents in green jobs ranging from fuel cell research to urban agriculture; from designing and building green projects to managing and diverting construction waste; and from developing energy efficiency software to manufacturing high performance windows.
These sectors all contribute to our City's goal of becoming a global Green Capital, and we want to identify how to best support these businesses on their road to success. Some green companies are established players in industries such as water or land remediation, while others are emerging sectors such as renewable energy, green retrofitting or urban farming.
Challenges
Not only is our goal - to double the number of green jobs - an ambitious target, but we also need to understand how to define a "green job" in the context of Vancouver: our geography, our climate, our human resources and our existing industries. Unavoidably, Vancouver will be affected by world economic conditions, policies of senior governments, and other factors beyond our control, but we can prepare for demographic shifts and the changing demands of our major trading partners.
Your Ideas
How do you think Vancouver can best show leadership in sustainable economic development and grow our local green enterprises? How do we attract new businesses to our City, and ensure all our businesses can easily transition to greener practices? How do we make sure that what we propose will lead to real growth and new jobs, not onerous restrictions on local business owners, or bottlenecks because we don't have the right people for the job?
Will we focus on the large scale, such as installing smart grid technologies or district energy systems? Or should we also support small-scale projects led by individual efforts, such as weatherstripping or bicycle delivery of backyard produce? There must be many more ideas and alternative strategies, and we'd like to hear yours.
More information on Green Economic Development
Your images
Green the City is a visual database of images and ideas submitted by you as we journey towards our goal of becoming the World's Greenest City by 2020. See the green economy images you submitted