Auckland tops table of cities going green fastest

Auckland: The Kiwi supercity was the surprise winner of most improved green city. Photo / Thant Zin, Unsplash

The city of sails has risen to the top of study listing cities doing the most to "go green at speed".

A new study by business services broker Bionic compared the world's largest cities by 13 ecological indices - including air quality, forest cover and plastic pollution - to monitor changes since 1990. Calculating an index score out of 100, they aimed to locate which urban hubs had travelled furthest to clean up their act.

Auckland was identified as the city which had undergone the most radical transformation in the past three decades.

Tamaki Makaurau was praised for green spaces, which had increased by 6 per cent and the high number of jobs in the sustainability industry per capita.

The Kiwi super city was also the largest to land in the top 10. "Unlike other large cities across the world, its size hasn't held it back when it comes to going green," said the report.

The Swedish capital, Stockholm was one of the lowest plastic waste producers, although air quality left something to be desired. Photo / Anna Hunko, Unsplash

The survey comparing the world's 40 largest cities saw Auckland join the likes of Stockholm (2nd) which has the lowest contribution of plastic waste and Lyon (3rd) which has seen green spaces and forested areas grow by a fifth.

It's not all praise for the city. Auckland was one of the worst offenders for mismanaged plastic pollution, spewing out more unrecycled waste than several cities combined. Auckland currency contributes 177300 tonnes of plastic waste per year. That's 2600 more than Sydney, a city five times the size.

However, Auckland's contribution is a drop in the ocean compared to the bottom three, least improved cities.

The Turkish capital, Istanbul landed near the bottom of the table for environmental decline. Photo / Fiath Trk, Unsplash

Bueno Aires, bottom of the list, has lost almost a fifth of its forest coverage (-19 per cent) since 1990. Lahore (39) had the third worst air quality on the list, behind Delhi, and Istanbul (38) contributed over a million tonnes of mismanaged plastic every year, a number only expected to grow but in the next three years. The biggest factor in low performance and improvement was the lack of jobs in the sustainability sector.

"Global warming isn't something that's going to happen - it's here, happening right now," said Les Roberts of Bionic.

"We wanted to see where in the world this was happening the fastest."