Sadhu Johnston: 'We're going to reduce our emissions 80% by 2050'
-- Building Design & Construction, 10/1/2007 12:00:00 AM
Sadhu Johnston was recently appointed Chief Environmental Officer of the City of Chicago by Mayor Richard M. Daley. Previously, he had served for two years as Commissioner of the City Department of Environment and for a year and a half before that as Assistant to the Mayor for Green Initiatives. Prior to working for the City of Chicago, Johnston was executive director of the Cleveland Green Building Coalition, which was responsible for the green renovation of the Cleveland Environmental Center. He earned a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College, where he worked on the Living Machine ecosystem.
BD+C: How did the Environmental Action Agenda come about?
Sadhu Johnston: For years, the mayor had been working to green our operations as a city. Different departments were moving forward in some areas, not in others. When I came on board, the mayor asked me to convene all the departments in a Green Initiative Steering Committee. We worked for about 10 months. Out of that came a document that set forth goals and benchmarked where we had been and set forth the path of what we were going to do as a city to green our own operations. So it's been our guide for building a sustainable city.
BD+C: What are some accomplishments?
SJ: Well, we've planted between 400,000 and 500,000 trees since the mayor's been in office, and that removes the air pollution from about 40,000 cars a year. We've got over 80 miles of planted medians, over 150 miles of bike paths and bike lanes in the city. We've built a 22-acre green roof over what was an abandoned rail yard. We've got over 3.5 million sf of green roofs that are constructed or in design in the city. Green cleaning strategies are being used in city buildings. We're buying hybrid vehicles for our fleets. We've got a new stormwater ordinance, and some great incentives, such as the green permits.
BD+C: What is the Comprehensive Climate Action Agenda?
SJ: We recognized we didn't really know what the impact of climate change would be on Chicago and the region, so we brought in some of the world's leading climatologists to help us understand that. We've taken global models and downscaled them to Chicago, to understand what the actual changes if we do take action and if we don't.
What the scientists are telling us is that we could have a climate equivalent to that of Houston's by 2095 if we don't take action, but either way we're going see a hotter, drier climate here. We're going to see a similar amount of precipitation annually, but it'll be coming in extreme stormbursts, so we'll see more flooding potentially Ultimately, well see a warming of Chicago, with extreme storm events, extreme heat. We need to adapt to those changes, in the built infrastructure, emergency response services, even long-term planning for what types of trees we should plant to survive that kind of heat. The second piece is to understand how we impact the climate in Chicago and what we can do to reduce our impact. We've calculated our greenhouse gas emissions for the city, about 34 million metric tons as a city, and we're developing strategies to reduce that by 80% by 2050
BD+C: And climate change overall?
SJ: The mayor was a leader four or five years ago when nobody was talking about it. We have committed to reduce our emissions by 1% a year, and we've achieved that goal every year for the last four years.
BD+C: What is the “Green Business Strategy”?
SJ: It's a comprehensive green business strategy for the city. One area we identified is waste. Businesses in the city generate a lot of waste, and there are opportunities using innovation networks between businesses to help them reduce that material. The Waste to Profit Network is a network of 80 businesses that have joined us. We do an extensive input/output analysis of all the material flows in each of the member companies, and they work together to see how they might be able to reuse materials.
Abbott Labs had 200 drums of a concentrated form of chlorine that they were going to have to pay to dispose of, and it turned out that Mittal Steel could use that material in their water treatment facility.
BD+C: And the Environmental Scorecard?
SJ: We recognized that we need to hold each other accountable across city departments, so we've created an Environmental Scorecard in five areas: energy, air, land, water, and waste—and we're tracking our performance in improving environmental conditions.
BD+C: What's Mayor Daley like as a boss?
SJ: He keeps you on your toes. He travels a lot, to other cities, other countries, and he brings ideas back and says, Let's try this here. He's a really deep thinker about solving urban challenges in a creative way..
He's also extremely detail-oriented. He'll be biking thru the city and he'll take notes of things that he sees and you'll get notes telling you that there's graffiti, or an overturned dumpster, and his office tracks those things to make sure that action has been taken.
So he's very hands on, detailed oriented, but he also gets the big picture.
VIEW ALL GALLERIES