Korea’s first-ever international conference on urban policy saw a welcome focus on adopting low carbon LED (light-emitting diode) lighting as a means to create smarter, greener cities in Asia.

Co-organized by the UN-Habitat, the Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements and the Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology, The Climate Group also participated in The Future of National Urban Policy: Towards Smarter and Greener Cities, which took place on December 14-15 in Incheon, Republic of Korea.

A speaker at Korea's international urban policy conference. (Photo Courtesy of Climate Change Group)

The conference featured more than 100 speakers, and attracted an audience who had gathered from over 30 countries to hear how national urban policy can support integrated climate-resilient cities.

LED lighting

In a session organized by the UNESCAP East and Northeast Asia Office – where the Northeast Asia Low Carbon City Platform which aims to bring together organizations in the region working on low carbon cities was presented – Margaret Lo, Head of Programs and Projects, Greater China, The Climate Group, outlined how smart urban development can be accelerated by introducing LED street lighting.

During the session, The Climate Group’s LED scale-up program was presented as an example of collaborative opportunities with cities in the region. Our new call to action for governments and utilities globally to schedule their switch to LED street lighting, or an energy efficient equivalent, by 2025 was also highlighted, along with our LED=Lower Emission Delivered campaign which is designed to support the call.  

Global collaboration

The Climate Group also recently announced a partnership with the Global Lighting Challenge, an initiative by the Clean Energy Ministerial to deploy 10 billion high efficiency, high quality LED lamps around the world.

Partners and members include a coalition of governments including Australia, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, the US and the Directorate-General for Energy of the European Commission as well as China, committing to work to achieve domestic sales of over 5 billion LED lamps and lighting systems in the next two years.

Other presenting organizations at the conference in Korea included Innovative Green Development Program (China), City of Yokohama (Japan), China Executive Leadership Academy Pudong (China), ICLEI, and OECD.

2016 and beyond

Margaret Lo commented: “This conference was a great opportunity for The Climate Group to present our work around LED street lighting on such an international stage. The workshop allowed us to showcase initial findings from our global consultation and engage with local stakeholders in the region. This has been a particularly timely event as we are in the process of preparing China workshop in early 2016 covering regional topics of interest.”

The conference was the first meeting between these stakeholders to kick-start the platform led by UNESCAP. Later this year there will be a follow up discussion on how an effective platform should be set up to maximize impact.

This article was originally published on The Climate Group.