Sustainability in Germany
WHO: Meredith Keller
PROJECT: This past summer, 14 UW-Madison students traveled to Freiburg, Germany to learn about the city’s green initiatives. Students were from a variety of backgrounds, including landscape architecture, environmental policy, education, and engineering. The group toured passive house building, green spaces, solar cell manufacturers, and other important facilities to learn why Freiburg is often hailed as the Greenest City in the World.
Freiburg Green Summer students spent their six-week program living in University of Freiburg student apartments within the Vauban Neighborhood. Immediately students took notice of the emphasis placed on public green space, traffic reduction, solar technology and children’s programs and playgrounds. In addition to touring environmental facilities around the city, students enrolled in an Environmental Economics class at the University of Freiburg. Taught in English, the context of the course was centered around Freiburg and included the following themes – each of which is represented on this poster in real-world examples:
1) Concepts in Environmental Economics and Policy. Key lessons learned:
- Incentives are key to regulating consumer and business behaviors towards a more environmentally-sound way of living or operating (ie pollutions permits, limits to the volume of trash collected each week, imposing high costs for driving a car in congested areas, etc).
- In an economic context, pollution and waste are negative externalities that actually increase the cost of a product for consumers, leading to economic inefficiency.
- Several factors must be in place for an energy source to be viable: low cost (includes social cost), political will, abundance and dependability, and economic efficiency in the market – that is, does its true cost align with consumer demand?
- Offering effective public transport requires its developers to make the system more efficient, cleaner, cheaper, and convenient than cars.
2) Waste Management
3) Electricity from Renewable Energy Sources
4) Sustainable Transport