Ecocity Insights

Ecocity Builders and the BCIT Centre for Ecocities win international award.

Written by Jennie Moore

by Jennie Moore,  Director, Institute Sustainability at British Columbia Institute of Technology and Director, Ecocity Centre of Excellence at BCIT.

The International Congress and Convention Association and the Best Cities Global Alliance announced that Ecocity Builders and BCIT’s Centre for Ecocities have won this years Incredible Impacts Award. The award celebrates the power of international conferences to advocate for and create positive societal impacts. An independent panel of international judges decides the winner.

The Ecocity World Summit is the longest running international conference series on sustainable cities. An intention of Ecocity Builders, keepers of the conference series, is to build capacity locally wherever a Summit is held. BCIT and the City of Vancouver, hosted the Ecocity World Summit 2019 last October at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

As part of their bid to host the 2019 Summit, BCIT committed to create the Centre for Ecocities as a legacy to provide tools and training to cities locally, and around the world, to help them become ecologically healthy. The goal is to also engage students and faculty in fantastic educational experiences with a host of international partners and educational institutions committed to these same goals. Informed by the Summit’s theme “Building the Bridge to Socially Just and Ecologically Sustainable Cities” and the International Ecocity Standards, for which BCIT’s School of Construction and the Environment (SOCE) has been an academic lead since its inception and to which City of Vancouver staff have generously donated staff insights and expertise, the Centre is now moving forward by working with ten municipalities across British Columbia, including Vancouver, to help them close their sustainability gap. To learn more visit: https://commons.bcit.ca/ecocitycentre/bc-pilots/ . The Centre is also collaborating with strategic partners to the Summit including: Colleges and Institutes Canada, UN Habitat, UNEP and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature to develop educational resources aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals aimed at helping our students and young people around the world become climate change-makers and sustainability leaders.

Funding to launch the Centre was generously provided through a quarter million dollar grant from the Real Estate Foundation of BC

About the author

Jennie Moore

Dr. Jennie Moore is Director, Institute Sustainability at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. Dr. Moore has extensive experience in the realm of ecological sustainability and urban systems including climate change and energy management, green buildings and eco-industrial networking. Prior to joining BCIT she worked for over a decade at Metro Vancouver as Manager of Strategic Initiatives. Her research explores the potential for Vancouver to achieve one-planet living. Jennie is a senior associate of the One Earth Initiative and a core advisor to the International Ecocity Framework and Standards.

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