Rate Your Own City on Four Measures That Beat Any Ranking

Job for today: score your own city on four measures. It takes about 30 minutes, and it will tell you more than any top-five list.

1. Electricity. Find your state or territory’s renewable share of electricity from the Clean Energy Council’s annual report or the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). Ten minutes.
2. Getting around. Look up how people in your area travel to work in the ABS Census journey-to-work data. Note the share that use public transport, walk or cycle. Ten minutes.
3. Waste. Open your council’s latest annual report or waste page and find how much household waste is diverted from landfill, and whether a food and garden organics bin is offered. Five minutes.
4. Green space. Check whether your council or state publishes tree canopy or parkland figures. If it doesn’t, that’s an answer too. Five minutes.

Write the four results down. That’s your city’s real sustainability profile, and it’s one most rankings can’t give you.

Why a ranking is the wrong tool

Lists of the most sustainable Australian cities are easy to write and hard to defend. They usually name five places in an order without saying what was measured. Is it electricity, transport, waste, water, green space or all of them? Without that, the order is an opinion. A ranking that puts one city first and another third can’t tell you whether the difference is real, or which measure drove it.

There’s a structural problem as well. Electricity is the number everyone reaches for, and it isn’t a city number. Grid supply is organised by state and territory, so a “renewable share” belongs to the state or territory, not to the city sitting inside it. Perth is a useful example: it’s on a separate grid from the eastern states, so national figures don’t map neatly onto it.

What the data does show, in general terms

Treat these as pointers to check, not figures to quote.

• The ACT. The ACT Government adopted a 100 per cent renewable electricity target and reports having met it, which is why Canberra comes up in nearly every sustainability conversation. That’s an electricity result, and says little about transport or waste.
• South Australia. The state has been among the leaders for the share of its electricity that comes from wind and solar, which the AEMO and Clean Energy Council reports track over time. Again, that’s the grid, not the city’s bins.
• Everywhere else. The mix varies by state and keeps changing as new projects connect. Check the current report, not last year’s headline.

What each measure leaves out

• Electricity says nothing about how efficient the buildings are or how far people drive.
• Travel to work captures commuting, not the weekend, and depends on a Census snapshot.
• Waste diversion depends on how each council counts and what it collects.
• Green space is easy to count and doesn’t guarantee that people can reach it.

No one measure settles it. That’s the point of using four.

The fair case for rankings

Rankings have a use. They start conversations and put cities under a bit of healthy pressure, and a simple list is easier to share than four tables. If one gets you looking into your own council’s performance, it’s done something useful. The problem comes when the list is treated as the answer rather than the prompt.

Where your own habits fit

Cities are the sum of a lot of small decisions, and some of them are in your hands. Home composting and a native garden make a difference at household scale, and the practical side is covered in our guide to building an eco-friendly garden. On the waste side, a home waste checklist starts with the food scraps bin. And if you’re thinking about heat and energy bills at home, the piece on cool roof technology explains how reflective roofs work.

Check your own city

Next job: take the four results from the top of this page and compare them with another city’s. Use the same sources for both, so the comparison is fair. If your own city is behind on one measure, find out what the council or state is planning, and whether there’s a consultation you can join.

Sources: Australian Energy Market Operator, Quarterly Energy Dynamics and reporting on the share of renewables in the National Electricity Market (https://aemo.com.au/); Clean Energy Council, Clean Energy Australia report (https://cleanenergycouncil.org.au/news-resources/clean-energy-australia-report-2026); ACT Government, Climate Change and Greenhouse Gas Reduction, renewable electricity (https://www.climatechoices.act.gov.au/energy/what-the-act-government-is-doing/investing-in-our-local-renewable-energy-industry); Australian Bureau of Statistics, Census, journey to work (https://www.abs.gov.au/census)