Lights off as Joburg celebrates Earth Hour
27 March 2017
The City of Johannesburg led by example when it switched off all lights at its Metro Centre headquarters in Braamfontein and at all regional offices for one hour to mark Earth Hour on Saturday night.
The iconic Nelson Mandela Bridge, a few kilometres down the road from Metro Centre, was also in complete darkness between 8.30pm and 9.30pm as Johannesburg joined the rest of the world in switching off their lights in a symbolic demonstration of their commitment to the fight against climate change.
At the Butcher Shop restaurant at Mandela Square in Sandton, where City of Johannesburg Member of the Mayoral Committee for Environment and Infrastructure Services Cllr Nico de Jager was having dinner to mark the occasion, management switched off the lights and used generators instead.
MMC De Jager was joined at the dinner by Dorah Modise, CEO of the Green Building Council of South Africa, and staff members of his department.
Earth Hour is an international lights-off campaign initiated in 2007 by conservation group the World Wide Fund (WWF) in Sydney, Australia, to draw attention to climate change. It seeks to highlight global warming, which is caused by the burning of coal, oil and gas to drive cars and power plants.
At the Earth Hour dinner at the Butcher Shop, MMC De Jager said there was a great need to fight climate change.
“We need to reduce our carbon footprint. This is not a Johannesburg or South African initiative. This is a worldwide phenomenon.
“We need to preserve our environment so that our children and their children can have a future. They are going to be around when we are no longer here. They will look around and say: ‘Why was this not taken care of?’ We have an opportunity to rectify where our parents went wrong because we didn’t know about these things. We didn’t realise the impact of what we were doing. Global warming is a real-life crisis that we are facing,” Cllr De Jager said.
He urged Johannesburg residents to go beyond switching off their lights and appliances. “What we are saying with Earth Hour is that we should start by reducing the way we use our electricity. Embark on energy-saving methods at the house. Energy-saving measures should be implemented on a daily basis,” he said.
The City of Johannesburg is a signatory to the COP21 agreement, signed at the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference in Paris, France, in 2015. At that meeting the City committed itself to combating climate change.
As the economic heartbeat of South Africa, Johannesburg remains one of the biggest generators of greenhouse gas emissions in the country. Its reduction target has been set at between 40% and 65% by 2040.