Kang Seung-woo is the Business Desk editor at The Korea Times. Prior to this position, he covered politics, national affairs, finance and sports.
Seoul claims global climate action award
Solar panels at Jamsil Baseball Stadium
By Kang Seung-woo
By Kang Seung-woo
Seoul City's efforts to the tackle climate crisis have gained global recognition after the city won a C40 Cities Bloomberg Philanthropies Award for its renewable energy plan, the city government said Friday.
According to the Seoul Metropolitan Government, the award ceremony was held at the C40 World Mayors Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, Thursday, and Seoul won the renewable energy category for the second time since 2014.
C40 refers to the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, an emissions reduction advocacy group founded in 2005 with more than 90 of the world's greatest cities.
The awards are granted in seven categories ― clean air, engaged citizens, resilience, green mobility, transformative change, green technology and renewable energy ― and provide global recognition for cities demonstrating climate action leadership.
Along with Seoul, the award winners included China's Guangzhou and the Indian city of Kolkata, which won the awards for green technology and green mobility, respectively.
“Seoul is engaging citizens and businesses in a wide array of initiatives to make solar more affordable, accessible, and in some cases mandatory,” the group said on its website.
“The Solar City Seoul project has already added 64 megawatts of new solar photovoltaic (PV) systems in 2018, which generated 252,989 megawatt hours of electricity and cut 116 tons of CO2 emissions. The project has even greater goals to deploy domestic solar PV panels to 1 million households, install solar PV systems on all municipal sites, and foster growth in the solar industry to achieve 1 gigawatts installed solar PV capacity by 2022.”