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NEW YORK: Toronto's mayor and business leaders announced Tuesday a new social networking Web site that will allow residents to measure their impact on the environment and reduce it. The city is believed to be the first ever to give its residents such a tool, officials said.
Zerofootprint Toronto was announced at an environmental summit hosted by former U.S. President Bill Clinton and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, with mayors and local leaders from more than 30 major world cities in attendance.
"Where national governments can't or won't lead, cities will," Toronto Mayor David Miller said. He challenged the other leaders at the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit to adopt the new model in their cities.
Zerofootprint Toronto, scheduled to be launched in July for about 40,000 selected residents before going citywide, will let people calculate their personal impact on the environment by answering questions about their lifestyle — the vehicle they drive, the diet they have, even the number of garbage bags they throw out each week.
The software behind the Web site then calculates the impact in terms of carbon footprint, water usage, even trees used to support the person's way of life.
"People say, 'What can I do?' said Zerofootprint CEO Ron Dembo. The not-for-profit company usually offers services and products to help businesses reduce their impact on the environment, but he realized the Web site could be scaled for hundreds of millions of users. "It clicked: we have the tools to empower them."
Residents also will be able to share tips for reducing their environmental impact and create communities online to challenge each other to do more. And cities will be able to use the information to create other environmental programs, the officials behind the project said.
"It's exciting, innovative and, frankly, pretty cool," Miller said. "Imagine the impact of a social network of like-minded green thinkers."
Toronto, Canada's largest city with about 2.6 million people, was the first city in the world to create a municipal climate agency, in 1990.
Like other mayors at this week's summit, Miller was eager Tuesday to share what progress his city has made. The goal, he said, is to make Toronto the greenest city in North America.
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