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Pando | Sustainable Communities

Pando.sc is the digital companion to the new 5th edition of Toward Sustainable Communities: Solutions for Citizens and Their Governments.

Capitals Coalition

The Capitals Coalition is a global collaboration redefining value to transform decision making.  We sit at the heart of an extensive global network that has united to advance the capitals approach to decision-making.  The Coalition provides an overview of the landscape, highlights connections, engages in outreach and facilitates expert advice within the capitals community.  We ensure that different parts of the system are connected to one another and that leading organizations and experts are working collaboratively to achieve our shared ambition.  By working with our many thousands of global partners we accelerate momentum, leverage success, connect powerful and engaged communities and identify the areas, projects and partnerships where we can collaboratively drive transformational change.

A Global Survey of Urban Sustainability Rating Tools

Criterion Planners, November 2014.  Document here.  

Neighborhood Sustainability Assessment Tools and a Comparative Analysis of Five Different Assessment Tools

Serkan Yıldız, Mustafa Yılmaz, Serkan Kıvrak, Arzuhan Burcu Gültekin.  Planlama 2016;26(2):93–100 doi: 10.14744/planlama.2016.05914

ABSTRACT

The search for finding solutions for urban problems led to the emergence of efforts to apply the concept of sustainability to cities and hundreds of assessment tools have been developed to assess the sustainability from buildings to neighborhoods and urban scales. Neighborhood Sustainability Assessment (NSA) tools, which examine the buildings together with their environments and evaluate the topics like society, land usage, transportation , water, air, energy and biologic diversity as a whole economically , environmentally and socially, are the tools that have been presented in recent years and started to be recognized and used very recently. In this study, it was aimed to introduce relatively mostly known 5 NSA tools, reveal the differences and similarities among them through various comparisons and make an assessment. The main point of the study was comprised of determining the approach differences between the systems in respect of the main goals of sustainability through the comparison of each system's main category and criteria in terms of scope, number and scoring. With this study, the world literature that is quite limited on this topic will be developed and contribution will be made to increase the awareness of the topic. It is also aimed to contribute establishing an assessment tool in Turkey.

Common Good AI

Common Good AI is a non-profit organization that leverages human abilities to innovate and find solutions by integrating digital AI tools to empower groups of any size to collaboratively ideate, debate diverse ideas, identify shared goals, and find a path forward together.

ICLEI USA

A Network Built by Local Governments, for Local Governments

For more than 30 years, ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability USA (ICLEI USA) has supported cities, towns, counties, regions, and Tribal nations in helping them achieve their climate and sustainability goals. As the nation’s first and largest local government network dedicated to this work, we are a U.S. nonprofit, founded in Massachusetts and headquartered in Denver, Colorado, with staff located across the country.

Since 1991, we have served as an affiliate office of the global ICLEI network, operating as an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit while being a part of a community of more than 2,500 local and regional governments in 125+ countries. We support our members as they pursue their priorities across five pathways: emissions management, nature-based, equitable, resilient, and circular development.

Emergence Field Labs

Emergence Field Labs (EFL) is an evaluation and learning infrastructure organization built for nonprofits, grassroots organizations, and social sector practitioners. We build AI-powered tools that make rigorous, community-controlled evaluation accessible to any organization, not just those with research teams or big evaluation budgets.

The premise is simple: social systems fail not because of bad people or bad intentions, but because of weak feedback loops. Organizations collect data constantly but rarely turn it into learning. EFL exists to fix that, to build the infrastructure that helps communities structure their own experience, own their own data, and participate in a network of collective knowledge.