This week Tokyo was one of 10 winning cities announced at the C40 and Siemens City Climate Leadership Awards. The inaugural event took place at Siemens Crystal in East London’s Royal Docks, an urban sustainability research facility and exhibition space. The cities represent the strongest project entries in each of 10 sustainability and leadership categories. Projects for consideration were selected from both the C40 members and the 120 cities profiled in the ‘Green City Index’ and the 29 finalists were announced earlier this month. The independent, seven-member judging panel – consisting of former city mayors, architects and representatives of the World Bank, C40 and Siemens – selected Tokyo’s Cap-and-Trade Program as winner in the ‘Finance and Economic Development’ category:
Tokyo’s Cap-and-Trade Program won the Finance and Economic Development category. Launched in April 2010, it is the world’s first urban cap-and-trade programme, requiring CO2 reductions from large commercial, government and industrial buildings through on-site energy efficiency measures or participation in the emissions trading scheme. This effort stood out for its strong record of success in achieving tough emissions reduction targets in an impressively short period of time: in terms of overall compliance with the two commitment periods required by the program (2010-2014 and 2015-2019), 93 per cent of required facilities have now met the first compliance factor and 70 percent of those facilities have already met the target to 2019. The success of this programme provides a compelling example – as well as a blueprint — for other cities to follow.
Yuki Arata, Director of Emission Cap and Trade Section in Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) Bureau of Environment, collected the award on behalf of Tokyo and presented in one of the sessions (link, PDF). You can read more about Tokyo’s Cap-and-Trade Program here.
