It looks like Copenhagen is about to get a lot greener in the not too distant future. The city is aiming to become carbon neutral by 2025, but it will be getting greener in the literal sense soon as well. That’s because City Hall has given the green light to allocating 3.7 million kroner of next year’s budget to planting 23,700 new trees in the Danish capital in 2016.

“We believe that a green city is the city of the future,” Tommy Petersen, a spokesperson for Radikale at City Hall, told Metroxpress newspaper. “Every year 10,000 new people move to Copenhagen and that puts pressure on the green areas. We need better air and green areas to ensure well-being in the city. Out of a budget of over 3 billion kroner, I think it’s money well spent.”

Forest in the city
Copenhagen Municipality has a goal to plant 100,000 new trees over the next ten years. Out of the 23,700 trees that will be planted next year, 400 will be ‘partnership trees’.

‘Partnership trees’ involve ordinary citizens contacting the municipality and being involved in choosing the type of tree and its prospective location. The municipality obtains and plants the tree after which the citizens will be in charge of maintaining it.

The vast majority of the other trees will be planted together near Islands Brygge with a view to creating a forest in the middle of the city centre.

Copenhagen Carbon Neutral by 2025
The CPH 2025 Climate Plan is a holistic plan as well as a collection of specific goals and initiatives within four areas – energy consumption, energy production, green mobility and the City Administration. Work in the four areas must be set in motion immediately for Copenhagen to become the world’s first carbon neutral capital. The CPH 2025 Climate Plan describes how our ambitions for carbon neutrality should be used as leverage for a better quality of life, innovation, job creation and investment, and how the goal of carbon neutrality can be achieved by 2025 through close cooperation between government businesses, knowledge institutions and Copenhageners.

Principles in the preparation of the CPH 2025 Climate Plan to keep Costs down:

• The transformation takes place gradually over a long time period.
• Sound financial initiatives are set in motion as soon as possible.
• The shift to green transport, which is relatively expensive, starts with development projects in most cases.
• As well as reducing carbon emissions, initiatives should also, if possible, create green growth and enhance the quality of life.

Click here to read the 2025 Climate Plan

Source: Copenhagen Post