It was discovered in the 10th century, and known as “the very nostrils of the island” by the Polynesian explorer Tara. Whether it is ‘Wellywood’ ‘the Windy City’ or the ‘Melbourne of New Zealand’, everyone has an opinion on what’s next for this place we call home.

Let’s face it, everyone is sick to death of the ‘s-word’. Sustainability. It’s not fun, it’s not sexy, and it’s everywhere. But it’s something we need to be thinking about and talking about… but above all acting on! As Ian Cassels, property developer and director of the Wellington Company says “It’s nothing more than forward thinking!” So if we think of it like this, what sort of ‘forward thinking’ does our capital need?

Mark Weldon is the CEO of NZX, and says that Wellington is a talent and service based city rather than an industrial city. “It is mainly supplied by renewable energy and becoming the first sustainable capital would be a perfect branding and positioning opportunity for Wellington. Wellington has a reputation for being small but influential and we should continue that in regards to sustainability.”

The city council do indeed have big plans for Wellington to be the ‘world’s first sustainable capital.’ This means the ambitious target of stabilising our corporate carbon emissions by 2010, and achieving a 40 per cent reduction in our corporate emissions, and a 30 per cent reduction in community emissions, by 2020. New Zealand is now becoming part of the global ‘350 movement’. It sounds technical, but it’s quite simple. The number refers to the ideal parts per million concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The current concentration is 387ppm, and the movement aims to reduce the level to – you guessed it – 350ppm.

But why should we care?

Mayor Kerry Prendergast reckons we can use our sustainable status as a strong positioning tool. “People are factoring sustainability into where they choose to visit or live, and it simply makes good business sense. Being ‘first’ would give us an advantage nationally and internationally.”
But Ian is worried. “Well you’ve got to be slightly worried! The world’s first sustainable capital… People don’t always necessarily understand what that means. At the moment we have a three year local election cycle, and we never really get the important things figured out.” More on the politics later… He also says that the whole tourism campaign based around Wellington has two sides. “On one hand it’s great. We used to get 6 passenger liners a year, now we get 26. Tourists in Wellington make a huge difference compared to Auckland, there all they do is clog up Queen Street!” However, he also has an issue with the campaign: that it’s not hitting the key core consideration. “Wellington is the office of the nation, whether we know it or not, and that’s its key earning strand. The city needs to be good at implementing a business plan around that notion, and making it work better.”
Andy Allison is the head of PR firm Creo Communications, and is worried too. “To set a goal like that without credible follow-through would be counter-productive to say the least. Nothing damages the sustainability movement more than hollow, unsubstantiated words. We just need to ensure that we define clearly what we mean by sustainability and we have a clear series of steps towards making this real.”

“We need to change they way sustainability is seen” says Peter Salmon, director of Moxie Design Group. “Unfortunately at the moment it is all about limiting what people are doing. You can’t force people out of cars if the buses and trains aren’t working. You need to first improve the quality of life going forward. We can’t live in caves!” He tells me about his experiences while working for Radio NZ: “You know, we get people ringing up all the time getting excited about going back to gardening and making preserves. I just think we can’t go backwards like that, it’s not the right way. We need to create solutions and stop being phobic.”

Ian doesn’t think we should go back to caves either. “You can’t get rid of technology or the world will be a bleak and miserable place. We need to plan to be here in 500 years. If you look at the way we plan you’d believe Wellington thinks its lucky to be here in three years. But what you do is try to make technology work, be reusable, smarter, and more long-term in its own sphere. “Last year we decided to bring in an electric car from China. It cost $12k and is an absolute lemon. But it was a brave and early attempt. So now we need to move on from that. Wellington is a perfect city for electric cars. It’s so small, we plan a ten-minute car trip and almost want to take sandwiches and coffee.” So it doesn’t actually matter that the car ended up being a ‘completely hopeless piece of junk’? “No! Sustainability is just a series of imperfect steps. And to have any kind of long-term plan, you need an understanding of what the city needs. If you were Bill Gates and you owned Wellington, you would put a light rail system in tomorrow. If Gates can work it out, why cant we?”

Right. So everyone at least agrees that we need to figure out what the ‘s-word’ actually means. What does it mean to them? What will this new capital actually look like?

“It will go well beyond carbon neutrality,” says Andy. “If indeed genuine carbon neutrality is possible. In a resource constrained future, the importance of issues like effective, safe and comfortable public transport and air quality will become even more important.”

Mark agrees with the transport issue too. He suggests extending the airport runway out into the harbour so large planes can land directly from places like Hong Kong, with a boat taking visitors straight to the centre of town.

That’s rather a big change; Kerry sounds as though she disagrees. “I don’t think Wellington will necessarily look substantially different – it’s more about how we do things and always keeping an eye to the future.” But being sustainable has to be more than about the carbon neutral stuff…. Right? “Yes!” says Kerry. “It’s about a livable city that meets the economic, environmental, cultural and social needs of its residents now and for future generations.”

Peter has an additional idea on what sustainable means, other than carbon neutral. “Well, it’s not just about climate, economic sustainability is very important too. Business sustainability needs more focus. I mean, what does carbon neutral mean? If it’s just about offsetting, then aren’t we just shifting our guilt?”

“It’s about asking ourselves what sort of New Zealand we want,” says Karen Fifield, CEO of Wellington Zoo. “We all have to live in this country, we have to have agriculture, native species, forests but we also have to have warm houses and be able to live our lives, and so we need to find out what that looks like.”

THE APATHY that surrounds the ‘s-word’ is widespread. What should be said to the guy who discounts this green focus of late as just another ‘fad’, where everyone is just keen to jump on the bandwagon, save money, and look good?

Andy is disparaging: “If it is a fad it is a pretty huge global version involving many of the brightest minds of our generation. Quite simply we cannot continue to use resources in the way we have been, and whether the response is called sustainability or plain common sense, you would have to be living on another planet not to recognize this.”

Mark, too, has some hard words for the doubters. “The earth has been supplying us with ‘cheap credit’ and eventually as with financially cheap credit things start to go bad and you have to start paying some of that credit back. You would have to have your eyes closed not to see that the time has now come for us to pay back our debts.”

Karen is a little more pragmatic. “Ten years down the track we might say it was all a waste of time, but there is enough evidence that are too many of us on this planet, and we are consuming too much, particularly in the developed world. We’ve got to put a stake in the ground, and say this is where we are going to start from now. I don’t know what we need to be hit over the head with to realise there is a problem with our planet – let’s just do something. We’ve just got to start somewhere.”
So no fad? “I’d say I wish we had the luxury of thinking it was just a fad!” Kerry says. “I know that history will show we were right to focus on sustainability.”

Self-help books always encourage personal goals. But what about for the city? What are our biggest, boldest goals for Wellington?

Andy starts with the specifics. “To make the city so commercially sustainable that relocation of large chunks of government out of the city would not threaten the city’s viability.”

“Wellington has to become a global city” asserts Mark. Ok… How do we do that? “Three things are needed. First, leadership and ownership of a relevant theme, such as sustainability. Second, building something globally distinctive that aligns and symbolizes that theme. Finally, the airport must be big enough to accommodate international planes and make it easy for global business people to come to Wellington.”

Linda Sissons is the CEO of Wellington Institute of Technology (Weltec), and not surprisingly her goals relate to education. “My boldest goal for Wellington is a tertiary education environment where your high-tech technological institution, the universities, and the local community polytechnic all form a seamless carpet of opportunities for everyone who lives here and for all who want to come here, whether from elsewhere in New Zealand or from overseas.”

Peter says if Wellington is to be the world’s first sustainable capital, it will be the world’s best capital. Recently he worked with James Elsen, the president of American company Sustainlane, whose work involves rating the largest 50 US cities in terms of sustainability. “But when he tried to do the same in New Zealand, to see how we measure up, he couldn’t!” The project was hampered because there was nothing to use as measurements. “If we’re serious about this whole thing, first we need to benchmark ourselves against others.”

WE SHOULD probably look at everyone’s deepest darkest concerns for our city’s future.
Andy starts. “My biggest worry is that we fail to capitalise on Wellington’s creative renaissance and on its unique geography. Given our scale we have a chance to apply far-sighted urban design and transport management systems, making this the most intimate city in the world. This includes ensuring that in tandem with intensification of residential dwellings in the city, there’s equally strong commitment to open and ‘human’ spaces. My fear is that if we don’t, it could become a congested and somewhat dysfunctional place to live.”

Ian is concerned about attitude. “If we don’t get some enthusiasm we will be a short-term pitiful self-proclaiming dowdy city that isn’t moving at the same speed as everyone else and is just going to go under the water again. If we don’t think differently we’ll never get out of the murk.” Dramatic enough? He also worries about too much growth. “If we were clever, we would set the optimum size and then work backwards. I don’t know how to do that, but we need to.”

Kerry sees it from a government perspective. “Making the necessary changes will require a great deal of political will, so I worry about maintaining momentum in the face of rising costs, competing priorities and possible complacency.”

Actually, it may be relevant to mention at this stage that our mayor got a fair bit of mention from those that contributed to this piece, and not necessarily always in words glowing with praise either. I take the liberty of summarising here, but it seemed that a great number of people felt that there was too much talk, and not enough follow-through. The short electoral cycle was blamed, as well as the “governmental tendencies to place risk-mitigation before all else.” Now that was a direct quote. But to me it seemed as though Mayor Kerry was saying many of the same things as the people criticizing our local government… But perhaps therein lies the critique: The government is not allowed to simply talk alongside the big thinkers, they have to talk, and then act.

“Change is not happening fast enough” worries Mark. “And a fundamentally important issue will become political and ideological rather than the right thing to do.” So perhaps the answer is to partially relocate the issue away from the political realm, and place it into the hands of…. Someone who will act quicker?

“We do need to be quicker and bolder about it” agrees Peter. “Rhetorical comments end up doing nothing but imposing risks on people.” He also worries about the future of business in Wellington. “I’m not the only one I know that frequently has to get on a plane and travel to Auckland for work. That can’t be a good thing.”

WHAT THEN should we be focusing on right now. What are the most pressing issues?
“I would focus on knowledge generation, close the Wellington Port, cancel transmission gully, and use the income and the space left by the port to build a globally distinctive centre for research, policy, science and markets.” These are Mark’s suggestions.

Kerry mentions sustainable spending. “Funding is the single biggest issue we face. Never before have community expectations been so high and their willingness to pay so low. We must maintain increasingly expensive infrastructure at the same time as continuing to provide the other things that make our city attractive and vibrant, such as events.”

Ian’s not impressed by the mention of money “I get incensed by it when a city says ‘we cant afford it’. They don’t know what they can afford until they do their finances, which at the moment are a huge mystery to most. If you took a clear view of how much revenue the CBD is producing, and how much more it could produce if you supported it properly, it would be a piece of cake. We need to have a business plan that involves the entire city – we can’t just spend half a million on a website thing, and then put on a bit of a carnival, and then say ‘look at our city, aren’t we clever?’”

Andy has one suggestion for where to get extra revenue from: “The council should introduce a city ring with a congestion charge for those who enter, with the goal of disincentivising unnecessary car journeys. Money levied in this way would go towards reinvigorating and subsidising the public transport system, creating pedestrian streets and replanting the city.

“Also I would love to see the council and planners intensify tree planting in the city so that the green spaces are not simply islands in a sea of concrete. There should also be a commitment to linking additional inner city dwelling (which should be encouraged) directly to additional public recreational amenity in the city. ”

Ian, too, is not short of suggestions. “We should be out getting our head offices back from Auckland. It should be Sydney-Melbourne-Wellington in terms of choices in Australasia. We should intensify Te Aro with more people living there and a couple of office buildings. We need to improve the quality of our buildings and put in a smart link out to the airport and six or seven windmills.

“We shouldn’t turn off the lights in Oriental Parade as some kind of namby-pamby idea that we’re saving power, we should be smart and produce enough of our own power so we can say ‘we love the lights, well turn them on even brighter!’ Then we should move the port down to Kaiwharawhara and turn all the Centre Port bit into well developed residential ‘other half’ of the harbour. “And lets come up with some outrageously smart technological thinking. For example, if we tried out ground source heatpumps, the harbour could provide huge amounts of heating/cooling for airconditioning”.

Mike Kerr, engineer at engineering consultants, BECA, suggests that as a city we could be looking at more share facilities so smaller companies can take advantage of modern technology like video-conferencing. He also mentions our strong cycling culture. “Wouldn’t it be great to see a big reduction in car use, simply because there was no need to have one?”

WELLINGTON was actually planned as a city based on London. How have today’s issues have changed from the issues that were pressing in the past.

Andy thinks they haven’t. “They are really an extension of the earlier issues, but they are intensifying as pressures grow from population increase and resource scarcity. Ironically, a greater population is also a prime opportunity for Wellington, if it helps make the city a more vibrant place. At a time when cities worldwide are heavily challenged by empty centres, Wellington is in a great position.”

To the future then. What do our Wellingtonians see in their city’s future? For once, everyone agrees. And it’s all positive. “I think that overall, Wellington is moving in an encouraging direction.” Andy begins. “You get a sense of deep affection for the place among decision makers, which is always a good start. To be genuinely sustainable, however, it’s as important that we get the detail right as it is that we get the ‘vision bit’ right.”

“We’ve come such a long way from that dull, grey bureaucratic city of twenty years ago,” says Kerry. “I definitely see us becoming the affordable, globally-competitive world-class city we’re working towards. We’ll continue to do well in tourism, despite growing pressure on air travel, we’ll continue to buck economic trends and we’ll be seen as a model for managing urban growth.”

Ian agrees. At least about Wellington not being dull. “The interesting thing about Wellington is that we are a government town, but we’re not deadly dull like most. We seem to have fun here, which is important. You can’t have a sustainable city which is dull and dreary.

He goes further. “We have this enormous opportunity, we are a small city, capable of acting really quickly. We’re amazingly set up from a travel point of view. We already have the trains, and we’re already a central city. The cost of getting to and from work in Wellington is environmentally so much better than Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane – people are not running around crossways like gnats. If we get our act together, we will get to the top of the environmental ladder very quickly. In terms of exemplar status we are huge. We have a name in the world, and with that, respectability.”
Linda reminds us to think about sustainability in terms of the development of knowledge and skill of the people that live here. “What we now know is that people who are “knowledge workers”, who can both do and think, are our economy’s hottest property.”

THE ROLE of local government is brought up again, this time by Mike. “We need leadership from local government. Wellington needs to continue to be a region and be developed to an overall strategy rather than just happening.”

Ian too, thinks we can’t just let things happen. “If we save enough water, we don’t need to build another reservoir. If we build our buildings and insulate them properly, we don’t need nuclear power stations. There’s two ways for things to happen. Legislation is one, and it’s hopeless and will never work. Evolution is the other, which is how it works in Europe and produces some wonderful results but we haven’t got 500 years to wait. We need a clever mixture of the two and there’s no reason why Wellington cant be an exemplar city for sustainability.”

Mike called Wellington a little big city. Glamour Magazine UK has said it has the edge of Seattle combined with the surfer vibe of Cornwall, Antoinette Muollo-Aharoni from PrimeProperty group called it a little Manhattan, and Ian Cassels says it’s a little a bit of Geneva, a reasonable amount of Paris, and a touch of Dubai.

Whatever you call it, everyone agrees with Ian’s assertion that Wellington punches miles above its weight. “Compare us with cities of similar size all over the world that are indistinguishable. Wellington has character and identity, a real place in the world.”

“Try going to a party in Auckland and talking about Auckland without someone yawning in your face. And then go to a Wellington party and talk about Wellington – you’ll see the difference.”

Do you have some big audacious aspirations for Wellington? Drop me a note – there is a lot more to say on this topic nadinei@in-business.co.nz