Following a unanimous vote by the City Council, Vancouver joins the growing number of cities aiming to run only on renewable energies. Vancouver’s City Council voted unanimously to shift the city’s energy use to 100% renewable energy sources within 20 years. Specifically, the Canadian city of 600,000 people will use only green energy sources for electricity, transportation, heating and air conditioning. The announcement was made at the 2015 International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) World Congress, a triennial sustainability summit of local governments, and makes Vancouver the latest – within a growing number of cities – to commit to running on 100% renewable energy. In fact, more than 50 cities have already disclosed their intention to go green, including San Diego and San Francisco, Sidney and Copenhagen; some of them, like Reykjavik in the electricity production and heating field, have already reached the target. The goal could be achieved in a few years in the electricity sector, but heating, cooling and transportation will take longer, so Vancouver is likely to set its goal for a target year of 2030 or 2035. According to the city’s deputy mayor Andrea Reimer “there’s a compelling moral imperative but also a fantastic economic case to be a green city”, and the ambition for Vancouver is to become one of the world’s greenest cities by 2020 despite the counter-productive environmental policy enforced by the Canadian government over the last 10 years. During the ICLEI World Congress, the mayor of Seoul Park Won-Soon delivered a remarkable speech, and declared cities and urban areas responsible for 70-75% of global CO2 emissions; he also committed to reduce Seoul’s energy use and increase renewable generation, hoping that by 2030 the city – which now has a population of 11 million people and is growing fast – will be able to cut its emissions by 40%. The gLAWcal Team POREEN project Monday, 13 April 2015 (Source: Guardian)