The Member of the Mayoral Committee for Environment and Infrastructure Services in the City of Johannesburg, Cllr Michael Sun, celebrated the annual Earth Hour commemoration on Saturday, 26 March 2022.
The celebrations were in aid of efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change. Earth Hour is an annual event organised by the World Wide Fund (WWF) and celebrated worldwide every year on the last Saturday of March, encouraging individuals, communities, and businesses to turn off non-essential electric appliances and lights for one hour, from 08:30pm to 09:30pm.
The City of Joburg joined and participated in the global switch-off on Saturday. The theme for this year’s earth hour was “Shape our Future”.
MMC Sun said: “The impact of climate change is being felt now more than ever before, from devastating floods to debilitating droughts, extreme temperatures, destruction of biodiversity and loss of life. Our planet needs help. Shaping our future is in everyone’s power. The climate emergency calls for everyone to act in unison, in healing our planet, by taking steps to limit human induced climate change.
“Symbolic events such as the Earth Hour are meaningless without concrete policies, programmes and actions to reduce the City’s carbon footprint and mitigate the effects of climate change.”
In March last year, the Council for the City of Johannesburg approved the Climate Action Plan (CAP). The CAP is the city’s contribution towards delivering on the terms of the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement commits signatories to holding the increase of global temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and to further pursue efforts to limit the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The main objective of the CAP is to put the City on a path towards achieving carbon neutrality and climate resilience by the year 2050.
The latest greenhouse gas inventory undertaken by the City confirms that 54% of the emissions emanate from stationary energy, which is accrued from the consumption of energy in buildings (residential, commercial, and industrial). As a response to this, the City has approved a Green Builds Policy, which is a step towards regulating building energy consumption in the City.
As a City, we value the power of partnerships and are cognisant of the reality that we cannot do it alone. Together with businesses, there are opportunities to work towards finding innovative, mutually beneficial ways of ensuring we live, work, and play in a City that we can be proud of.
As the world celebrates this year’s Earth Hour, let’s all embark on activities that will be to the benefit of future generations as the theme for this year aptly says.
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Issued by the City of Johannesburg
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28/03/2022
