30. Quito's Environmental Performance

Location: Julio Andrade Park, Ignacio de Veintimilla St. y Ulpiano Paez St.

The project gathered information and data over the past six months to monitor Quito’s environmental sustainability. With the addition of a new goal in the Sustainable Development Goals focused on sustainable urban development (SDG11), the need for reliable monitoring data related to environmental performance has never been greater. The project reviews the SDG11 indicators, proposes new criteria for determining the quality of indicators, and demonstrates data collection and analysis approaches using open data and open source software. The ecological footprint of Ecuador is equivalent to one earth, implying that the per-person consumption patterns in Ecuador may be sustainable if scaled to the global population. However, Quito’s ecological footprint exceeds the earth’s carrying capacity. This puts Quito in a unique position to demonstrate how urban and rural areas could relate within a sustainable future. Studying Quito’s environmental performance in this context will hopefully yield lessons applicable in other cities.