Making the SDGs Relevant for Cities: Using the Community Capital Tool in British Columbia

In the past three decades, mounting scientific evidence on the planetary condition has been sending a clear message: the world needs to be on a more sustainable pathway, quickly. Yet effective action has been elusive, partly because the effort to address global challenges needs to start at the local level. The 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) acknowledge the importance of localizing the global goals. The success of the SDGs is conditional on creating and implementing successful, monitorable, and transferable sustainability policies and practices in communities. In this chapter, we present our case studies with two municipalities in British Columbia, Canada, where we applied modified versions of the Community Capital Tool (CCT) and conducted a complex matching and mapping exercise to show the relationship between the SDGs, the CCT, and local goals in the municipalities. We also discuss the challenges and opportunities we identified with regard to achieving local sustainability goals and contributing to the SDGs. The B.C. municipal experience described here demonstrates that if Canadian cities incorporate tools such as the CCT into their regular practice, they can contribute to and become leaders in the achievement of Canada’s Federal Sustainable Development Strategy, Canada’s commitment to the SDGs.