In his speech in front of more than 1000 participants, Commissioner Piebalgs said the initiative will affect 80 million Europeans and will save around €8 billion in energy costs.
Denis Baupin, Deputy Mayor of Paris (Energie-Cités’ member city), said his city hoped to reduce emissions by 25 percent by 2020. The German city of Hamburg is even aiming for emissions reductions by 40 percent, as stated its Mayor Ole von Beust. Bob Parker, the mayor of Christchurch in New Zealand, Energie-Cités’ unique overseas member, congratulated his European counterparts to their ambitious commitment in a video message. At the same time, Buenos Aires and New York also backed this bottom-up movement.
During the ManagEnergy conference on Wednesday, Christopher Jones, Director for New and Renewable Sources of Energy at the Commission’s Directorate General TREN, expressed his enthusiasm for the initiative. For the Annual Covenant Conference in 2010 he expects a total of 1000 Mayors to have signed. Indeed, encouraging many more cities to join will be the task of the Covenant of Mayors office that was presented by Gérard Magnin and Kristina Dely from Energie-Cités during the conference. Gérard Magnin said he wanted to transform this actual “wave of cities into a tsunami of cities”. To establish and implement their own sustainable energy action plan, Covenant signatories will get assistance from the Covenant Office, ManagEnergy, the Joint Research Center as well as from national supporting structures.
As the leader of the Covenant of Mayors office, Energie-Cités will help local authorities in achieving their goals in the spirit of a statement by Bo Frank, Mayor of Växjö in Sweden on Tuesday: “What has to be said, has to be said and what has to be done, has to be done.”
Download Energie-Cités’ press release
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