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New York: from the UN Commission on Sustainable Development

Could New York be the world's least sustainable city?

The question came to me as I walked down the narrow corridors that pass for open space here, the city canyons that guide the cars and the people (in that order of priority) between the soaring walls of stone and glass.

I'm here for the two weeks of the - not reporting, but running a project aimed at enhancing media coverage of sustainable development issues in developing countries and the former Soviet bloc.

With journalists from Bulgaria, India, Kenya and Peru, we're running a mini radio station from the basement of the UN, reporting on the themes of the CSD negotiations, on issues raised by the numerous interest groups represented at the meeting, and - as making good radio means getting out of the studio - on some of the sustainability projects scattered among the suburbs of New York.

What exactly is meant by "sustainable development" is a question I'll come to in a moment - or rather, a question that one of the journalists I'm working with, Madhyama Subramanian, will come to.

But for many at the meeting, it's largely about the L-word: local production of food, local generation of energy, local employment, and so on.

I've had a long think about this as I trudge to and from the ageing UN headquarters through Manhattan's man-made canyons.

And it's an important question. ; and although few of them are as densely packed as New York, clearly the view that sustainable communities involve villages growing their own food and making biogas from residues left by their own cows is becoming less relevant.

Hope springs here, however. New York NGOs have taken international delegates on bus tours of urban farms, and showcased projects seeking to create green collar jobs in the city's most deprived areas.

Are these projects anything more than sticking plaster? Before answering, I thought I'd better do a few sums.

With a land area of about 60 square kilometres, Manhattan contains about 1.8 million people.

If you covered the area with wind turbines, packing them as closely together as you can without creating "wind shadows" for each other, then by my calculations you could install enough capacity to generate, at absolute maximum, about 1.5GW.

Manhattan's maximum electricity demand now is about 2GW. So maybe if you also covered every roof with solar panels, installed CHP schemes in every tower block and trimmed demand by installing smart meters in every home, you could just about envisage the district generating enough low-carbon electricity to meet its needs - though what the place would look like is another matter.

That's just electricity, of course; self-sufficiency in overall energy is a very different matter - unless the stream of big yellow taxis enters a permanent parking lot and everyone switches to big yellow bicycles, I suppose.

Food is a more difficult calculation because dietary habits and consumption can somersault with the circumstances of our lives. But according to one estimate, the average American - a person I've yet to meet, by the way - requires about half a hectare to produce the food he or she will consume in a year.

Cover Manhattan's roofs with the finest agricultural soils - best of luck with the , by the way - and by that measure you'd produce enough food to feed 12,000-odd people. Window boxes, fungi raised in dank cupboards and chickens given free range of the streets might add a few extra calories but it's going to be totally inadequate whichever way you cut the cake.

And the waste... as they say in these parts, "don't even go there".

All these are very rough calculations. But I hope the point is obvious: a city cannot survive without the life-support system of the land around, and the more densely packed it is, the less local must its service providers be.

So some other measure has to be arrived at for the sustainability of city life: the merely local metric won't do, and the idea that every crowded city can generate its own energy with no help from outside - let alone grow its own food - must surely be a product of an over-optimistic imagination.

I have no idea what that other metric might be. But as more of the world's cities echo the high-rise citadels of New York and Hong Kong, it would probably be a good idea to work it out pretty quickly.

Street life

The term "sustainable development" has been around for decades, but do people outside the confines of UN headquarters know what it means?

"A few days back, I was out on the streets of New York asking people if they knew the meaning of the term "sustainable development, as part of our ," writes Madhyama Subramanian. She goes on:

"I was a wee bit nervous, but was also quite looking forward to it, since this is my first trip to the US and I was just a day old in New York, still understanding the Avenue and Street system.
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"And I had heard quite a bit about how people in America really value their private space.
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"It was an amusing mix of responses and people, on a rainy Monday morning!
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"Many people were really serious, busy, on their way somewhere, and just the sight of my microphone made them veer past me.
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"I began first by asking some elderly people, because I thought they would be more open and patient in talking to nosy journalists, and my guess was right... they were not in much of a hurry.
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"I began by being really correct and asking people for permission to speak to them, and the number of 'No's I got made me miss India a bit; there, almost anyone on the street would be happy to talk to you, especially if you had a mic - in fact, they would answer you and then ask which channel the interview would go out on.
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"Anyway, a number of people did answer my question, and the responses of the number of people who did not know what sustainable development meant was very amusing, ranging from a simple 'No' to 'I have never heard the word sustain' to 'I am new to America, so, I don't know about these things'."
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"But what really struck me was the conversation that I had with an African-American cleaner called Roy Holder.
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"He was loading huge black garbage bags onto the garbage truck. When I asked him if he knew what sustainable development means, he said that he didn't, and asked for the meaning.
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"I told him that it was about caring for the resources of our planet, and using them such that they last over a long period of time.
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"To my surprise, he immediately started talking about what he felt.
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"He said: 'Starting from the Industrial Revolution, when the bigwigs known as part of the new world order started their programme to become the first billionaires, they stole this land from the native Indians.
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"'They polluted this land, and in their greed they destroyed it - so much so that now the Earth itself is a living organism and it has started reacting with natural disasters.
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"'I do this (cleaning) for money, but it also helps cleaning up the Earth. You replenish the Earth, come back and clean it up, one person at a time and try to get others, not forcibly, but willingly, to help do the same thing.
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"'In other words, we got to return back to common sense.'
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"What was striking about Roy was his confidence and his very matter-of-fact understanding of sustainable development, without any knowledge of the term.
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"I think that as long as we all have the basic understanding of our relation to planet Earth and the understanding that we have to use our resources carefully, we can hope for the planet that is well looked after.
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"Then does it really matter whether we call it 'sustainable development', 'curtailed consumption' or any other term that makes its way into the hallways of buildings that discuss development?
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"And if we have to educate people about caring for the planet, I guess it has to be in a way that people can relate to in an everyday kind of way.
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"A couple of days later I was in Central Park, asking people why they liked this huge, fantastic, magical place.
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"And the words that came often in my conversations there were very simple ones - nature, happy, blue, green, energy, peace!"

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