“Hot Times in a Cool City”

Conde Nast Traveler interviews Melbourne’s Lord Mayor on cities and climate change

The June 2012 issue of Conde Nast Traveler explores what actions Mayors, like Melbourne’s Lord Mayor Robert Doyle, are taking to help cities adapt to climate change in the article “Hot Times in a Cool City.”

Australia is a land of weather extremes. Events that used to occur at widely spaced intervals are now coming with a frequency we’ve never seen before. Over the last decade, we’ve experienced extreme drought in Melbourne and hard to ration water, and then almost overnight the drought broke and for two years we’ve faced dreadful flooding,” says Lord Mayor Doyle.

To help his city adapt to cases of extreme weather, Lord Mayor Robert Doyle is chairing C40’s recently launched Sustainable Urban Development Network- a group of urban leaders who are deploying replicable, scalable solutions for building the next generation of “green” cities.The network will work to share best-practices and develop a blueprint that can be used by cities to build their own sustainable communities.  

Lord Mayor Doyle also shared the City of Melbourne’s sustainability goals being implementedas the Rio+20 summit approaches. He explained:

Our goal is to be a zero net emissions city by 2020. We initiated an ambitious program of retrofitting 1,200 commercial buildings to reduce energy use. We’ve just hit the 200 mark. Our Docklands project, which is drawing citizens to the waterfront, will set a new standard for environmentally responsible development. We are also working with other cities to develop a blueprint for sustainable living.

Watch the Lord Mayor’s interview with the C40 News Team here.

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.

For further information from our partners, please visit:

• ICLEI
• World Bank
• World Resource Institute

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.