Yesterday we announced that 16 cities around the world will be able to increase the energy efficiency of municipal buildings thanks to a new Clinton Foundation partnership. The partnership includes critical financing by major banks, all of which have committed $1 billion. The loans will paid back through energy savings to Citi, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, UBS and ABN Amro. New York, Chicago, Houston, Toronto, Mexico City, London, Berlin, Tokyo and Rome are among the cities.
Today, The Clinton Foundation and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) announced a long-term partnership to develop a suite of technology tools that will enable cities to accurately monitor, compare and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
Microsoft, together with a consortium of partners, will develop a single Web solution to allow cities to clearly understand their environmental footprint. With this information, cities can make better choices as they aim to improve their energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions.
The new online, Web-based software tools will be provided pro bono to cities and will be available by the end of the year. The software tools will support cities to collaborate in new ways via the Web and online communities, enabling them to work together to monitor their progress and share best practices. They will be compatible with existing emissions reduction tools for cities, allowing the export and import of data from other systems.
In August 2006, President Clinton launched the Clinton Climate Initiative, a project of the Clinton Foundation, and announced a partnership with the C40 Large Cities Climate Leadership Group, a consortium of 40 of the world’s largest cities committed to fighting global warming. The online tools to be developed by Microsoft and the Clinton Climate Initiative will provide these cities with a baseline and standardized measurement of their carbon emissions, as well as the ability to track the effectiveness of emission reduction programs and share best practices.
Ultimately, the new software will serve as a global standard for cities in their climate change accounting, mitigation and communications efforts. The completed measurement tools will consist of a multilingual, online and offline software service accessible around the world.
Microsoft will lead the technical software development, and will help establish a consortium of private sector partners that will support the cities in the creation and long- term sustainability of the project. The Clinton Climate Initiative will direct the project and disseminate the new tool to cities that are taking action to curb carbon emissions around the world.
The Clinton Foundation and Microsoft will partner in this effort with ICLEI, building the new software tools using the knowledge base that ICLEI has acquired in developing emissions reduction tools for more than 1,000 cities worldwide. They also will be assisted in this effort by the Center for Neighborhood Technology.
The software will will enable cities to:
— Implement a common measurement system for emissions reductions
— Perform analyses of potential projects and estimate their effect on reducing emissions
— Generate structured and custom reports for users based on inventory and measures data
— Access data from around the world and engage other cities in dialogue about best practices in real time
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