Warning- Earth Hour City Challenge People’s Choice Award voting may itch your travel bug
As someone who already has a pretty itchy travel bug most of the time, my imagination was running wild as I ‘toured’ through the 17 finalists for the Earth Hour City Challenge People’s Choice Award. Needless to say, many potential itineraries were forming in my head as I sat in Toronto on a rather dreary March day, scrolling through these amazing sustainability initiatives happening around the world!
The Earth Hour City Challenge celebrates and highlights cities around the world that are working towards a renewable future- pretty inspiring stuff. There’s a People’s Choice Award up for grabs, and we get to help determine the winner by checking out the finalists and voting!
The 17 finalists include cities from 6 beautiful, diverse countries: Canada, India, Italy, Norway, Sweden and the United States. Some really impressive actions include, a solar powered airport in Cocchin, India, and in Colwood, right here in Canada on Vancouver Island (one of my absolute favourite places in Canada), has formed a Cycling Advisory Committee to ensure cyclist’s interests are considered during municipal planning. In our neighbour to the south, San Francisco has set the impressive goal of zero waste to landfills by 2020! The Province of Siena, Italy has set their sights in being the first zero emissions province in Italy. In Stockholm, Sweden, the city has introduced a “congestion tax”, decreasing traffic by 20-25%! Last but not least, Arendal, Norway has led the Climate Partner Network, a public-private partnership advocating climate best practices.
One of my favourite features of the City Challenge is that we get to experience the city through the eyes of its inhabitants- citizens of the finalist cities are posting Instagram photos of their cities. So we get to experience these wonderful places from the comfort of our own homes- perfect for those of us with active travel bugs!
Tour around the finalists yourself here and see which one of these inspiring cities gets your vote for the People’s Choice award! But hurry- you only have until this Friday, March 15th to get in as many votes as you can!
