ASIA: Cities agree to energy consumption cuts
Updated
The mayors of some of the world's biggest cities have ended a 3-day summit in New York with an agreement to make huge cuts in energy consumption. 16 cities have signed up to the initiative, which London mayor Ken Livingstone called "the biggest single step" in tackling climate change taken so far. Six Asia-Pacific cities have signed up - Bangkok, Karachi, Melbourne, Mumbai, Seoul and Tokyo.
Presenter: Corinne Podger
Speakers: Melbourne architect John MacDonald, of Design Inc; Former US President Bill Clinton; London Mayor Ken Livingstone; acting Melbourne Mayor Gary Singer; Tricia Phelan, Environment Victoria
PODGER: Cities consume an estimated 75 per cent of the world's energy, and emit around the same percentage of greenhouse gases. The Large Cities climate summit is looking to turn that around, by creating a partnership between big cities on the one hand, and big banks and energy firms on the other, with the aim of putting state of the art energy-saving technology in big city buildings. London will be one of the participants; its Mayor is Ken Livingstone.
LIVINGSTONE: We can reduce total global carbon emissions by about 10 percent. This is not just a new initiative, this is the biggest single step to tackle climate change that has been taken by any layers of government, anywhere in the world, since the debate about climate change started.
PODGER: One of the summit's organisers is the Clinton Climate Initiative, set up by former US president Bill Clinton. He admits that refurbishing an entire metropolis won't be easy, but says it's worthwhile to stop cities being such a heavy drain on environmental - and financial - resources.
CLINTON: Some cities will be more successful than others, some will have labour shortages, others will have gaps in operations. I'll bet you anything we'll have some delivery problems, and supplies. Real world, things will happen. But I know one thing, every day these people will get up and try to make something good happen. So the exhilarating thing to me is, that we're back in the solutions business, which is what I think politics should be about.
PODGER: The Australian city of Melbourne has also joined the initiative; the Acting Mayor is Gary Singer.
SINGER: There is a fund of money there that they're talking about a billion dollars initially, and maybe local banks will put in more money, but what will happen is, you'll borrow this money to retrofit an existing office building, which is energy inefficient, and you will pay the capital and the interest back, out of the energy savings, that you've generated after you've refitted your building.
PODGER: In Melbourne, the proposal has been welcomed by sustainability group Environment Victoria. But its climate change spokeswoman Tricia Phelan says that while it may see cities like Melbourne use less energy, there's a need for nationwide climate change strategies, which also address where energy comes from.
PHELAN: Over the last few years we have not moved quickly enough on climate change, our leaders have chosen not to support international efforts in addressing climate change. Here in Victoria over 90 percent of our electricity comes from burning brown coal, and that's the most greenhouse polluting way to generate electricity on the planet, so we need to become smarter in how we make our electricity and smarter in how we build our cities and our buildings.
PODGER: Melbourne's acting Mayor Gary Singer acknowledges Australia's slow movement on climate change, but says the continuing drought is strengthening the political commitment to find solutions.
SINGER: Melbourne is leading in this area, that's why we're in New York, the lord Mayor is in New York at the moment, to learn more about this with other leading cities in the world. And rather than take down a building, it's much better to retrofit it, make sure it's energy-saving and that's what we're looking at in the city of Melbourne.
PRODGER: Melbourne's 'CH2' building, which is home to the City Council, is Australia's most environmentally friendly structure, and has won a United Nations award for raising the bar in sustainable design. Its architects, DesignInc, say that if the will and the money are available, it's technically possible to make cities actually benefit the environment. DesignInc's director is John McDonald.
MCDONALD: The next generation for us, and I think it's the new frontier, is actually buildings we call restorative or regenerative buildings, which can actually generate more energy and collect more water than they use, and they reuse their waste, so the technologies are available to design these sort of buildings, we design them as technological and biological operating systems that actually help to improve the environment. When you start looking at them that way, buildings are actually good to have.
