CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY—At least 12 cities in five countries have pledged in their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions to shift to 100-percent renewable- power sources to help fight climate change as early as this year.
These cities’ ambitious but doable goals are contained in the carbon Climate Registry of the Carbon Disclosure Project through the Non-State Actor Zone for Climate Action (Nazca). Nazca registers commitments to climate action by companies, cities, subnational regions and investors to address climate change.
The cities’ commitments are also contained in the September 2015 update of the publication “Unlocking Ambition: Top Corporate and Sub-national Climate Commitments” published by The Climate Group, a PDF copy of which was e-mailed to this reporter by Nazca’s Ian Ponce through John Hay, communications officer of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Leading the pack is the city of Aspen in Colorado, United States best known for its posh ski resorts, which has committed to get 100 percent of its power from renewable sources before the end of this year.
Aspen’s 100-percent renewable goal is just one component of its larger strategy to reduce both operational and community-wide greenhouse-gas emissions 30 percent below 2004 levels by 2020 and 80- percent below 2004 levels by 2050.
This goal was proposed 10 years ago as part of the city’s “Canary Initiative,” which “identifies Aspen and other mountain communities as canaries in the coal mine with respect to their sensitivity to the effects of climate change.”
Aspen is the first of four US cities that have set the ambitious but doable shift to 100-percent renewable energy (RE). As of September, Aspen had been using about 75-percent to 80-percent RE.
The city of Burlington in Vermont, US, has targeted 2020 as the year it will achieve its goal of getting 100 percent of its energy demand from renewable-power sources. It plan to achieve this “through ownership and development of biomass, hydroelectric, wind and solar-power generation sites,” according to the UNFCC web site.
Another US city is Samta Monica in California, which set to get all its power demand from renewable sources by 2025.
San Francisco, also in California, planned to achieve the shift to 100-percent renewable-power sources by 2020. It pledged to “supply 100 percent of city-wide electricity demand with renewable sources by 2020 through hydroelectric, solar and biogas facilities, and distributed generation.”
The other eight cities that have set 100-percent renewable power targets are Oslo in Norway, which planned to achieve the goal by 2020; Copenhagen, Denmark, 2025; Malmö, Sweden, 2030; Säffle, Sweden, 2030; Växjö, Sweden, 2030; Stockholm, Sweden, 2040; Gävle, Sweden, 2050; and Vancouver, Canada, 2035.
UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres, UN Assistant Secretary-General for Climate Change Janos Pasztor, and other climate-change experts hail these cities commitments, especially since cities are an integral part of the solution in fighting climate change.
Scientific estimates show that cities are responsible for 75 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with transport and buildings being among the largest contributors. And these 12 cities are just the pioneers around the world that have woken up to this fact and are taking up the challenge to go green.
In a video posted on the Facebook account of the UNFCCC, Pasztor warned that “if we don’t address climate change, the chances are we may roll back the many developments we have achieved in the last 20 to 30 years.”
“There are increasing studies and increasing experience in many parts of the world which demonstrate that economic growth and addressing climate change do not need to be antagonistic to each other. There are countries, like Denmark, that have grown enormously but have kept their emissions below than what it was before,” he said.
These cities’ 100-percent renewable-power target is hoped to encourage other cities, regions, investors and individuals to do all they can and lay firm commitments in the hoped-for legally binding agreement against climate change during the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties to the 1992 UNFCCC in Paris in December.