134 ■ CITIES AND CLIMATE CHANGE
private sector organizations and by individuals. Th e government of Hong Kong
SAR, China, has been involved with a program to promote energy effi ciency in
homes through reducing the demand for cooling by keeping indoor environ-
ments at 25.5 degrees Celsius. In Mumbai, an eco-housing program that has
been introduced to encourage environmental effi ciency in residential buildings
is a voluntary building certifi cation program for new and existing housing. It
is proposed that developers as well as consumers participating in this program
will be off ered incentives, and although the incentivization scheme is yet to
be fi nalized with the state government, rebates in the form of reduced devel-
opment charges and assessment taxes have been approved by the Municipal
Corporation of Greater Mumbai in principle (MCGM 2008). As this example
demonstrates, fi nancial incentives are also an important element of enabling
action to reduce GHG emissions from the built environment. In Delhi, the state
government established an Energy Effi ciency and Renewable Energy Manage-
ment Centre, which provides partial monetary aid to domestic users for the
installation of solar water-heating systems, and in Seoul incentives are off ered
to buildings with high levels of energy effi ciency.
Our case studies also show that other forms of reward and recognition can be
successful in enabling other actors to respond to mitigating climate change in
the built environment. In Melbourne, the Savings in the City program involved
30 city hotels in a milestone and reward program to reduce energy and water
use and to avoid waste. By providing these businesses with independent recog-
nition of their success—and setting up a degree of competition between them
to achieve results—signifi cant savings of GHG emissions have been achieved.
Th is example shows that, in addition to providing information and fi nancial
incentives, establishing the right frameworks through which communities
and businesses can act on climate change is an important aspect of the role of
municipal governments.
Partnership
As well as enabling others to act, our case studies suggest that, increasingly,
acting on climate change in cities is dependent on a range of partnership and
private sector initiatives. In Beijing, somewhat surprisingly given the city’s
otherwise limited role in climate change policy and the nature of the state,
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been important actors in rais-
ing awareness about the possibilities of behavioral change for reducing GHG
emissions from the built environment through a joint campaign to maintain a
26 degrees Celsius room temperature led by Friends of Nature Beijing. In 2008,
the Environmental Protection Department and the Electrical and Mechanical
Services Department in Hong Kong SAR, China, drew up a set of “Guidelines
to Account for and Report on Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Removals for