Sydney Retrofit Program will Save Energy and Money

This week, Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore announced the start of a major retrofit project throughout the City of Sydney’s 45 properties designed to make them more water and energy efficient.

This two-year, $6.9 million project will ultimately return a savings of $1 million a year to the city as electricity use is cut by about 6.4 million kilowatt hours (kWh) a year and water consumption falls by about 53,300 kiloliters per year. All told, these efficiencies will add up to reduce the City’s carbon emissions by more than 12 percent.

How do these massive savings happen? In some cases, it’s as easy as switching out old lights for new energy efficient bulbs. In others, some buildings will receive new heating and air-conditioning systems and specialized systems to manage the electricity use of computers. Water-saving devices like aerated tap and shower heads will help reduce water usage.

“Our approach is to show by doing – we’re showing you can cut bottom line costs and seriously reduce your impact on the environment. It’s a win-win,” said Lord Mayor Clover Moore in a press release issued by the City of Sydney.

You can read more about the City’s project here.  

C40, ICLEI, WRI and partners achieve a significant milestone towards establishing a single standard for measuring emissions for cities

Today, C40 Cities and ICLEI - together in collaboration with the World Resources Institute and the Joint Work Programme of the Cities Alliance between the World Bank Group, UN-HABITAT and UNEP - announced a major step forward in establishing a standard for emissions measurement and reporting across cities of all sizes and geographies. Together, these organizations launched a pilot version of the Global Protocol for Community-scale Greenhouse Gas Emissions - a tool that will provide a consistent and transparent system for cities to plan for and finance climate change action.

From the release:

"Measurement and reporting underpins the local action driving C40 Cities leadership in addressing global climate change," says Jay Carson, C40 Executive Director. "As such, the community protocol represents the interests, needs and challenges of C40 Cities."

C40 Director Mike Marinello noted that the pilot is being launched one year after the initiative was announced.

"In June of 2011, at the C40 Cities Mayors Summit in Sao Paulo, we announced to the world that we would develop a way to standardize and harmonize GHG emissions measurement and reporting," said Marinello. "Less than a year later, C40 and our partners are delivering on that promise, demonstrating that there is a will for concrete action on climate change in cities around the world."

The pilot launch is the next step in a rigorous and collaborative process which included the release of a draft standard for public comment in March.

Read the full press release on the announcement here.

C40 an “Expert Institution” on the Knowledge Center on Cities and Climate Change (K4C)

We are pleased to announce that C40 has been identified as an “Expert Institution” by the Knowledge Center on Cities and Climate Change (K4C), a joint initiative of UNEP, Cities Alliance, UN-HABITAT, and The World Bank.

“The C40 is proud to join the community of expert institutions on K4C. C40 Cities are committed to taking meaningful action grounded in research to mitigate and adapt to climate change, which aligns wholly with the goals of the K4C,” said C40 Director Mike Marinello.

The K4C platform is intended to provide coordinated support to cities in addressing climate change issues, particularly those in developing countries, and is a response to the rapid development of recent research and knowledge in this field. C40's participation in the K4C recognizes the wealth of climate actions in C40 cities and the analytical lens C40 has applied to those actions -- specifically, in the creation of core research documents, "CDP Cities 2011: Global Report on C40 Cities," authored by KPMG, and "Climate Action in Megacities: C40 Cities Baseline and Opportunities," authored by Arup.

K4C aspires to become a comprehensive, online collection of information on the topic of cities and climate change, providing:

• Updates from the field on cities and climate change
• The sharing of best practices
• Facilitating exchange of innovative initiatives
• An online portal containing advanced search tools and an interactive map

C40's organizational profile on K4C and core research documents can be accessed here. 

Expert Voices: Stacy Lee, Policy Analyst, NYC Mayor's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability

New York City Green Buildings’ New One Stop Shop

Two weeks ago, the big picture of New York City’s green building efforts became a little clearer. Until now, a building owner, an architect, a consultant, a student, a policymaker, or anyone interested in learning what New York City was doing with buildings needed to delve through numerous City agency websites to find information, all the while finding it difficult to grasp the big picture of how these efforts were making a collective impact on the City’s sustainability goals. Even City employees had a hard time connecting agencies’ efforts. Facilities managers and other individuals complying with various regulations, such as benchmarking under the city’s comprehensive Greener, Greater Buildings Plan would have to research disconnected web pages jam-packed with information, yet difficult to navigate.

Recognizing these challenges, the New York City Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability and the Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications, with input from various City agencies and other organizations, created the PlaNYC Green Buildings & Energy Efficiency (GBEE) website, available at www.nyc.gov/gbee. GBEE is the latest one stop shop for information about New York City efforts in buildings and energy efficiency; similar resources are emerging from other cities, such as Philadelphia. Not only does GBEE aggregate information about efforts undertaken by different agencies. It also provides that valuable context absent from each stand-alone website. GBEE links related projects together on the same page, categorizes efforts based on their regulatory, incentivized and other characteristics, and provides resources on every page.

GBEE also contains a section on the history of New York City’s leadership in green building and energy efficiency policies. Few are aware that the role of large buildings in the environmental movement took hold in New York City in the late 1990s, resulting in the world’s first green skyscraper and the first green residential high rise in the U.S. – both in New York City. Through a brief glimpse of the past, viewers can see how far the City has come in greening its buildings and get a better sense of the City’s next steps. Additionally, the City is continuing its tradition of innovation with efforts such as the Mayor’s Carbon Challenge, Municipal Entrepreneurial Testing Systems (METS), and NYC CoolRoofs. As GBEE brings together all these efforts together for the first time, interconnected content demonstrates how the whole is greater than the sum of many parts.

GreenBiz: Why city mayors are a sustainability director's new best friends

“I believe that if you are a business professional immersed in driving sustainable development in our society, mayors should be your new best friends.” - Mohammed Al-Shawaf, SustainAbility

Mohammed Al-Shawaf, a manager for the Washington D.C.-based think tank SustainAbility, writes “Why city mayors are a sustainability director's new best friends.”

Al-Shawaf cites three reasons the Mayoral role is integral in leading city-wide sustainability efforts:

1. They are employing sustainability as a framework to tackle the immense challenges facing their cities;
2. They are decisive, accountable actors, using their administration's agility to respond to issues today in a way that is simply not happening nationally and internationally;
3. They need you as much as you need them.

The article also highlights the work of C40 Mayors as an example of how cities can decisively lead in creating innovative sustainable development initiatives from SustainAbility’s March 2012 reporttitled Citystates: How Cities Are Vital to the Future of Sustainability:

City mayors have their hands on the major levers of mitigation and adaptation in their cities. Dr. Rohit Aggarwala, special advisor to Mayor Bloomberg in his role as C40 [a global network of cities committed to climate change initiatives] chair, stresses that, "Mayors control the streets in most of their cities. Half of our mayors control their transit system. Most mayors have either direct control or significant control over planning decisions...[and] at least some influence over the standards to which their buildings are built." He concludes: "At the end of the day, waste, water, energy consumption and buildings and transportation policy -- those are the jobs of mayors in cities."

To read the full GreenBiz article, click here.