McKinsey&Company

Around the world, sustainable development has become a top policy discussion as countries struggle to maintain or enhance economic growth without compromising the future. Nowhere is the issue more pressing than in China, where urban areas and their economies are expected to grow rapidly over the next few decades and where resource use and environmental quality are already raising grave concerns. Fortunately, national and local leaders have responded to the challenge by making sustainable development a high priority.

Using a new metric, the Urban Sustainability Index, we’ve found mixed results for this nascent effort. While China’s current model of urban growth does not meet global benchmarks for sustainability, there are cities offering positive examples of sustainable development that could be copied elsewhere in China and in other developing countries.

Sustainable development, economic growth that improves the lives of the people without exhausting the environment or other resources, is especially critical in developing countries, where mass urbanization is taking place at a time when man’s impact on the environment has reached a critical juncture.

Yet history offers precious few examples of such development during the early and middle stages of urbanization. As a result, sustainable development has become one of the defining policy challenges of our time. Because of the exceptional growth rates they are witnessing, cities in the developing world are the focal point of this struggle for sustainable growth.

• The Urban Sustainability Index: A New Tool for Measuring China’s Cities (PDF - 2332 KB)