Welcome to SEI’s U.S. Center
The Stockholm Environment Institute is an international not-for-profit research organization that has been engaged in environment and development issues at local, national, regional and global policy levels for more than 20 years.
Our goal is to bring about change for sustainable development by bridging science and policy. We do this by conducting integrated analysis that supports decision-makers.
SEI's work is interdisciplinary in nature, drawing upon engineering, economics, ecology, ethics, operations research, international relations and software design.
We work all around the world building capacity for integrated sustainability planning through training and collaboration on projects.
SEI's U.S. Center is a research affiliate of Tufts University in Massachusetts and also has offices in Davis, California, and Seattle, Washington.
Bangalore: The city as a living organismProject maps 'urban metabolism' for sustainabilityBangalore has been one of India's great success stories, booming as a high-tech capital. But this boom has also brought a surge in population, increasing demand for resources and services that the city's utilities and infrastructure are struggling to meet.  A WATER DELIVERY TRUCK IN BANGALORE / ERIC KEMP-BENEDICT In the last decade, the Bangalore population has grown by 3 million people, to about 8.5 million – three times the previous 20 years' growth. Utilities can't keep up with the rising demand for water and electricity; the region's natural resource base, in turn, is also severely strained. And Bangalore is not alone: Rapid population growth and economic activity in several Indian cities have overwhelmed their ecological support base, leading to chronic shortages in electricity, water and road space while polluting the physical environment. A Bangalore native now based in SEI-US' Davis office, Vishal Mehta is now leading a project to map the city's resource use in the context of socio-economic and demographic trends, to help local decision-makers and stakeholders plan for a more sustainable future – and in the process, develop a model that could be replicated in other cities. The project, Urban Metabolic Mapping: Securing the Biophysical Foundation of Indian Cities, is funded by SEI with Indian partners. The key policy tool it is developing is a modeling framework that treats cities as living entities that use energy and resources to generate useful products and waste. Consumption data will be compared with social, economic and demographic information. Current and future development scenarios will be gauged against dimensions of economic efficiency, social equity and environmental sustainability, facilitating civic discourse on the nature and impacts of various development pathways of Indian cities, and engaging civic bodies at city, state and national level. Along with Mehta and Eric Kemp-Benedict of SEI, the multidisciplinary team includes ecological economists and environmental scientists at the Indian Institute of Management and the Indian Institute of Science. Throughout the project, the team is also engaging closely with the diverse actors involved in crafting solutions: from government, to civil society. As part of the project, on Feb. 2, Kemp-Benedict and Mehta presented the urban sustainability framework at the Bangalore World Water Summit. The following day, SEI and IIM co-hosted a day-long participatory planning exercise for stakeholders, Imagining Bangalore: A scenarios workshop on the city's long-term sustainability; participants included government agencies, academic scientists and NGOs. Take a look at early results from the Bangalore 'urban metabolism' project. |