"Vancouver Green Capital" is the City of Vancouver’s business brand for economic development. It is part of a strategic effort for the City to leverage the once-in-a-lifetime economic development potential of the 2010 Games.

The "Vancouver Green Capital" brand is at the heart of the creation of a robust, long-term economic strategy that will guide the City's pursuit of economic opportunities around the world.

Why "Green Capital"?

Vancouver is physically green and historically green. Vancouver is now defining green for the future – as a business focus for growth.

"Green Capital" is most simply defined as “Vancouver’s currency and its economy; our focus and our future.”

Vancouver’s "greenness" is overarching. It is a key to our collective identity. Vancouver citizens live in a green paradise, and it has inspired them to protect the livability of their home. There are no freeways through the centre of the city, and the city has nurtured the planet’s most storied environmental groups and attracted entrepreneurs and innovators.

“Capital” signifies commerce and currency; a place of concentrated activity and concentrated leadership. "Green" is nature, sustainablity and growth.

Green companies are those that understand that their bottom lines include people and planet, as well as profit. Some of the world’s biggest and most progressive companies have understood that "green" is no longer a “nice-to-have”: it’s integral to doing business.  

Consultation

The brand was developed with extensive consultation with leaders from a range of industries and interests, and with a profound reflection on the fundamental characteristics of Vancouver. The key to the exercise was the knowledge that if we are to brand our economic development interests, the brand story the City tells must be true to who we are as a region and as a society.

The consultation revealed nine economic differentiators that set the City’s business story apart from other cities: from nature and nurture: the paradise premium and the livable city, to new economy: Vancouver’s business 2.010, to forward thinkers: genius at work in a city at play.