The Climate Group is an award-winning, international non-profit organization, working with business leaders, government partners and corporates to promote a prosperous, low carbon future for all. We believe this can be achieved through the rapid scale-up of low carbon technologies. The Climate Group has established itself as a respected, independent and powerful voice in the low carbon sector. We have long experience of working closely with cities, municipalities and sub-national governments as well as corporate leaders willing to make ambitious commitments for carbon emission reduction. We operate across the globe, with offices in Greater China, North America, India and Europe.
Over the past 8 years, we have been promoting LED street lighting as one of the most actionable and ready to implement solutions to reduce carbon emissions globally at scale. Lighting accounts for nearly 6% of global CO2 greenhouse gas emissions, or 1,900 million tons of CO2 per year— the equivalent of CO2 from 70% of the world’s passenger vehicles. By making lighting more energy efficient we can make a significant dent in carbon emissions.
In 2012 we conducted the LightSavers project - a global trial of LED lamps in 12 large cities around the globe to evaluate how the latest LED products performed and are perceived by the public. The results were presented in a report highlighting how LED technology is ready for full scale rollout around the world. We also published a technical summary for lighting managers as well as a series of city specific reports.
Since then, many cities have announced major upgrades to LED lighting, but the vast majority have still yet to make the move. As a result in 2014 we entered the second phase of the LED-scale up project and announced the launch of a consultation process supported by our lead Partner Philips Lighting, to identify remaining regional barriers to adoption of LEDs and accelerate the transition to energy efficient lighting around the world.
At Climate Week NYC 2015, we called on every single city and utility around the world to schedule the switch of their street lighting to LED ( or as efficient) by 2025. We also launched our new major global campaign LED = Lower Emissions Delivered and a published new report, The Big Switch: Why it's time to scale up LED street lighting.
The report reveals that while technological barriers for adoption have now largely been overcome, cities want more support from government and financial institutions to refine business models and financing options to help them make the switch.
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