21st Century Infrastructure Forum Explores Links Between Public Health, Economy and Environment

21st Century Infrastructure Forum Explores Links Between Public Health, Economy and Environment
U.S., California and LA Leaders from Across Sectors Discuss How Green Infrastructure Could Address Challenges in National Healthcare, Economic Instability and Global Warming

LOS ANGELES – July 30, 2009 – Infrastructure planners joined public health, utility, labor and green economy leaders at the TreePeople Center for Community Forestry on Thursday, July 23rd, for a special forum on the challenges and solutions of sustainable, green infrastructure planning.

The goal of the event was to look for a new breakthrough in the traditional planning of infrastructure and to examine how it could systemically solve other public policy, economic and environmental issues, according to Andy Lipkis, TreePeople’s founder and president.

“The job of this conference is to blend the externalities, such as public health, into our consideration of infrastructure,” said Lipkis. “Building infrastructure that serves our health needs could offer substantial economic savings in healthcare and prevent unnecessary waste.”

Lipkis’ correlation between healthcare and infrastructure served as an introduction to keynote speaker Dr. Richard Jackson, chairman of the department of Environmental Health Sciences at UCLA. According to Jackson, the United States has more than doubled its percentage of GDP spending on healthcare since he was a young doctor (7 percent to 16 percent).

In the last twenty years, the number of people with diabetes in the U.S. has doubled, while the number of obese California teenagers has doubled in the last decade alone. One contributing factor to obesity and poor health is a lack of physical activity, which is oftentimes fueled by a reliance on automobiles for even the most basic mode of transport, according to Jackson.

“The more time you spend in a car, the more likely you are to be obese,” said Jackson. “We have the option of urbanism,” said Jackson, “Walk-able cities equal healthy cities.”

Patrick Condon, a professor of landscape and livable environments at the University of British Columbia, agreed. Having jobs closer to home, increasing the concentration of mixed used corridors and allowing greater access to natural areas and parks are some supporting ways to not only create walk-able cities, but also help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Condon also gave background on the challenges faced in creating sustainable cities. “So often sustainability ideas run into a process in which one bureaucrat after another says ‘no’ to an idea, because that is what they are supposed to do,” said Condon. “They have no ability to say ‘yes’ in a system that doesn’t value sustainability.”

“Our policy framework needs both top-down guidance and bottom-up creativity,” said Don Smith, vice chairman at MWH Global. From his career as an engineer, Smith outlined the difficulties in coalescing various stakeholders and policy in a single infrastructure project. “The first 5 percent of a project can change direction and add value,” said Smith. “You can have a huge impact, but once you get past expansive scoping questions, progress is difficult. The big questions have to be put forward when you’re developing major projects.”

The need for a broad view and cross-sector collaboration was echoed at the end of the forum in breakout sessions, and finally, in a taped special message to the forum by Van Jones, special advisor to the president on green jobs, innovation and enterprise, as well as a member of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and the founder of Green for All.

“Too long we have put ourselves in our silos, little stovepipes, and fought over crumbs,” said Jones. ”We must put together a new bakery instead of fighting over those crumbs… We now have an opportunity in L.A. to show the world that we can change.”

“So when federal and state dollars come in for infrastructure stimulus spending,” concluded Lipkis, “there’s an opportunity to spend them in a way that addresses human health, climate change and job creation. It’s our hope that instead of just replicating the old, unintentionally destructive methods, we use new, proven approaches that solve multiple problems.”

Workshop attendees have agreed to continue working together to ensure that this can happen.

For more information on the workshop, please visit http://megacities.usc.edu/research/workshop-2009/.

Sponsors: MWH, University of Southern California Center for Megacities, TreePeople, Keston Institute for Public Finance and Infrastructure Policy. Funders: The California Community Foundation, The California Endowment, MWH.

About TreePeople Center for Community Forestry: The LEED Platinum Certified TreePeople Conference Center, located in 45-acre nature preserve overlooking Los Angeles, is a gathering place where leaders from diverse backgrounds can creatively address our most pressing urban problems. The campus is a living example of green infrastructure, integrating parking, water conservation and storage, flood prevention, greenwaste recycling, solar energy and urban forestry.
# # #