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Climate Change: EU Citizens’ Agora asks for greener buildings |
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On June 12th and 13th, the European Parliament organised the second edition of the EU Citizens’ Agora, a forum gathering 500 representatives of European civil society. The theme of this year was climate change. CECODHAS members were present among the participants, who amid other key demands, ask for a better support to green housing.
In a key-note speech, leading US economist, Jeremy Rifkin, presented its vision of a the necessary “Third Industrial Revolution”, which should rely on 3 pillars:
The first one is renewable forms of energy—solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, ocean waves and biomass. The second is the transition to a hydrogen-based economy (unlike the current hydrocarbon-based economy). The third one is the local generation of energy. “You have to imagine the EU in 25 years, every home, every factory, every technology plant, every shop, every building would have become a power plant producing local energy” said Rifkin.
This vision gave food for thought to the participants of the thematic workshops that were given the opportunity to produce recommendations to the European Parliament. This participatory democracy exercise, to which some CECODHAS members took part, had meaningful results for social housing sector: the Agora calls for example the EU to encourage the financial and banking sector to develop instruments in favour of sustainable production and consumption patterns, such as green mortgages for renovation or construction of “energy positive” buildings. More generally, it calls for European and national policy makers to remove economic and administrative barriers for promotion of energy efficiency and renewable energy usage in all sectors, especially to invest in green social housing. Those recommendations should be integrated in the report of the European Parliament on the EU climate and energy package, ahead of the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen in December 2009.
To read the recommendations of the Agora, click here
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