Next month’s UN Climate Change Conference (COP23) in Bonn will harness clean energy to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions it creates.
The organisers are working to ensure the event is a climate neutral one by implementing a range of measures.
“The first step of our programme is to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of the event as much as possible by taking measures, for example energy efficiency. The second step is to use renewable energy as much as possible, but still you will have a certain amount of emissions that are not avoidable, so in a final step these emissions need to be compensated. Compensation means an investment in climate protection projects in other places,” explained Dr Hartmut Stahl from the Öko-Institut (Institute for Ecology) a key advisor to the German government on sustainability issues relating to COP.
COP23 takes place between 6-17 November 2017.
And there are a range of actions that businesses and individuals can take to contribute to a global reduction in emissions. One, led by the United Nations Climate Change secretariat, is the ‘Climate Neutral Now Pledge’, a voluntary programme that encourages organisations to take climate action by ‘measuring, reducing, and offsetting’ their unavoidable emissions.
