Riverside is committed to maintaining the city's incredible beauty and improving the quality of its natural environment to control sprawl in the region and enhance the quality of life for all its residents. Along with updating its General Plan, the city is also updating its Subdivision Ordinance to bring consistency to the city's future land development, particularly vacant and underutilized land. The Ordinance will reflect Riverside's unique goals regarding property development standards by incorporating New Urbanism principles into the subdivision design process to encourage sustainable development and require specific design elements such as narrower streets, grid street patterns and pedestrian accommodations.

Riverside envisions a cleaner, greener environment for its residents and is aggressively pursuing cleaning up the city on a number of fronts. To start with, the customer-owned Public Utilities strives for energy diversity by increasing the use of energy from renewable, environmentally friendly wind, water, waste, sun, and geothermal sources located in California. Presently, Riverside gets 26 megawatts from Green Power resources or 12 percent of its power content. Riverside has several photovoltaic (PV) generation stations located in town at the Metrolink Station Carport, RPU Operations Center and the Autumn Ridge Apartments. Plans are moving ahead for nine more PV generation stations towards the utility's goal of 1 megawatt of locally generated solar power within Riverside.