By Laurie Goering
LONDON, May 15 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – One of the highlights of the Sydney social calendar has long been the spectacular Lord Mayor’s New Year’s Eve party, held each year at the iconic Sydney Opera House.
This year, however, the money put into hosting the exclusive bash for the city’s well-heeled has been reallocated to something more important, the mayor says: Ramping up action on climate change.
“People have been quite amazed that I’d do something so radical,” said Sydney’s Lord Mayor Clover Moore, who has run the Australian city since 2004 – and who last year took political heat over the rising cost of the party, which accompanies the city’s famed fireworks display.
At a meeting late last year of the C40 network of cities that are leading on climate change action, she said, “the message to all city leaders was that to have any realistic chance of meeting the Paris Agreement, we had to do twice as much in half the time”.
So the approximately A$750,000 ($560,000) cost of Sydney’s big bash is now instead going toward things such as 10 new urban parks over the next year, a zero-carbon building competition, efforts to help tenants access renewable energy, retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency and expanding efforts to help commercial buildings cut their emissions.
Creating climate-friendly projects that people can see and benefit from on a daily basis – particularly new parks but also bike lanes and pedestrian-only streets – is crucial to building and maintaining support for action on climate change, Moore told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview.
“People can’t see emissions reductions,” she said. But giving residents visual signs of green progress – amenities they want that also happen to cut emissions – “creates some ownership,” said the mayor, who walks in the city’s parks most days with her husband and dogs.
