Urban Sustainability Initiative (BIE)

The Urban Sustainability Initiative ( USI ) is a collaborative effort between the University of California at Berkeley and a diverse range of public and private institutions in Asia , Africa and Latin America, seeking to integrate cutting edge science into the decision-making processes of urban areas throughout the developing world.

The overall goal of this initiative is to work with partner cities to build their capacity to develop in ways that minimize the environmental impacts of growth by:

1. Identifying and monitoring critical urban environmental indicators and the policies and practices that influence those indicators
2. Accelerating the application of existing promising technologies and management practices
3. Developing and demonstrating the application of improved technologies and management practices
4. Creating an extensive urban sustainability information network to share lessons learned with cities around the world

With financial support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, we are creating "living laboratories" in cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America to test new approaches to environmentally sustainable urban development. These new approaches are combined with existing promising practices to identify what works and why, and then to facilitate the transfer of technologies and practices that work to cities throughout the world.

BIE home

The University of California at Berkeley has long been a leading environmental research center, with some 100 individual undergraduate and graduate programs with foci in the environment, in addition to dozens of top research centers. The Berkeley Institute of the Environment (BIE), established in 2005, brings together and helps enhance these diverse campus programs and research units in new and innovative ways. The Institute’s goals are to address complex environmental problems by:

• Making research tools and understanding accessible across disciplinary lines;
• Fostering collaboration and new ways of thinking about critical environmental problems across disciplines; and
• Training a new generation of environmental researchers, citizens and professionals.