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The Solar Impulse Foundation call to cities :
Creating the conditions to scale-up adoption of clean technologies

 

Through its Solutions for Cities initiative, the Solar Impulse Foundation seeks to highlight concrete solutions that can help cities reach their environmental goals. For the past four years, we have focused on sourcing and assessing technologies that are deployable today and that can protect the environment in an economically profitable manner.

We are calling on cities to create the enabling environment required for these technologies to be deployed on their territory.

If you are a city official and this message resonates with you and your ambitions, you are invited to show your support by signing up to this pledge:

The latest IPCC report shows that in three years global Greenhouse Gas Emissions must peak and begin to descend rapidly to stave off the worst impacts of climate change. Even in the most optimistic scenarios, current commitments by national governments are not sufficient to keep temperature rise below 1.5° C.

We recognize that the main barrier to dealing with climate change is not actually one of technology. Rather, the innovation we need is in laws, markets and incentives to adapt them to our current objectives.

Cities have an outsized environmental footprint, but they are better placed than most to capture the benefits of environmental protection - economic growth, new jobs, improved quality of life – and to align the market behind their objectives.

We are calling on cities and their officials to recognize this and pledge to take steps that will favour the adoption of clean solutions that are as logical as they are ecological by;

  • Publicly report environmental data and progress on commitments to ensure existing measures are suitable and aligned with their targets.
  • Integrating environmental procurement criteria into their purchasing practices and processes to ensure that sustainability and its benefits are at the heart of their decision making.
  • Considering the whole life cost of their purchases when assessing the Return on Investment.
  • Abandoning the notion of lowest common bidder as the most decisive criteria in purchasing decisions
  • Stepping up efforts to work together with like-minded cities to undertake joint purchasing agreements so as to de-risk investments.
  • Ensuring that the business community is fully integrated into the cities efforts to reduce its environmental footprint.

Cities have both the capacity and responsibility to lead, and the decisions taken by and within cities will ultimately set the course for society’s ecological transition. We need to give ourselves the best chance to achieve that goal.

Respond to the call :

 

We wish to extend our thanks to the International Cleantech Network and Metabolic for their contribution to the development of this call.