Park City is set to host the Mountain Towns 2030 Net Zero Summit in October with some 40 mountain towns attending.
This three-day event is being planned by Park City’s Sustainability Team. Team Manager Luke Cartin has invited mayors and officials from several large and small mountain communities along with business leaders and other who are committed to bold climate action. He’s hopeful,his informal group will share their successes and look for future collaborations.
“The goal is to get everyone in the same room and say, hey if we all looked at setting ambitious climate goals on the 2030 time line and really, truly stepped it up in the best practice sharing and the latest science, there are pieces that every community holds that’s key that they are subject matter experts in, we really think this greater sharing and marching toward a greater goal, is going to be effective,”Cartin said.
Invited participants he says will share their best practices in focused workshops to help create commitments to aggressive goals to commit to net zero.
“Main themes are first day is kind of inspiration,” said Cartin. Second day is the problem solving solutions piece and the third day is getting out and about and seeing some of the solutions that are in place in Park City.”
The conference will open Wednesday, October 2nd at the Grand Summit Hotel. Environmentalist and humanitarian Jane Goodall will give one the first of two keynote address at the Eccles Center later that evening. Tickets are $20 and sales will open to the public on August 1st.
“She's amazing to hear talk and actually her talks have focused on climate change, said Cartin. The second day the major headline there is Paul Hawken. He wrote Project Drawdown - he's got the Drawdown Fund. The great thing is when we reached out to both of them and their organizations, they stepped up immediately said yes, we want to be a supporter of it. So, we have 2 major headlines then on top of that we have a lot of best practices. We have a finance board that's talking about where sustainable finances are going, especially on municipal levels. We have a grassroots part 2 saying these are the major concerns over community and this is how the best way to engage and communicate with them.”
The second keynote speaker, Paul Hawken has written the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming and ranks the top 100 solutions to climate change.
The 2030 date is important given that the world’s climate scientists agree to control global warming, the earth needs drastic reductions in carbon emissions by 2030 and there is a significant gap between current policies to make that happen.
More information will be available at a website being developed at www. mt2030.org.
