California dominates the list of America’s greenest cities according to a new survey.
The Golden State gets a gold medal for sustainability, as it is home to six of the top 10 greenest cities in America, with sunny San Diego taking the No. 1 spot.
To identify the greenest areas of the country, researchers compared the 100 largest cities across 28 key “green” indicators. The data set ranges from greenhouse-gas emissions per capita to the water quality to green job opportunities.
The survey reveals that San Diego’s ranking is thanks to a few factors, one being that it has the highest number of solar panel installations per capita. Nearly half of the city’s electricity comes from renewable sources, which leads us to the next point: San Diego has the second-lowest Urban Heat Island Effect Index in the U.S.
“What that means is there’s only a relatively small amount of difference between the average temperature in the city and its less-developed immediate surroundings,” the report reads. “In other words, use of green energy in San Diego helps keep it from being an excessively hot city environment.”
Following San Diego on the list are Washington, D.C. and Honolulu, and the top five is rounded out by two more California locales: San Francisco and San Jose. Followed by, from 6 to 10, Seattle, Oakland, Portland, Fremont, Irvine.