World Environment Day challenge

The Queenstown Lakes District Council has issued a challenge to its communities to take part in a ten part challenge on World Environment Day, June 5, 2008.

“We have developed a very do-able challenge that not only gets people to think about sustainability at home and in their place of work, it gets them to begin to take action,” QLDC Mayor Clive Geddes said.

The challenge was for families, and work colleagues, to ‘tick off’ each of the 10 challenges on June 5 and then go on to implement five of the challenges on a daily basis.

Not only would those taking part in the challenge contribute in a small way in our community, to our country and globally, but they would also reap the benefit of saving money on their power bill.

“In addition to issuing the challenge, which I urge every member of our community to accept, we will be gifting each and every school in the district a tree and all pre-schools a shrub to plant on World Environment Day, which also marks Arbor Day,” Mr Geddes said.

Every tree planted is estimated to offset around 730kg of CO2 emission over its lifetime.

“Reducing our carbon footprint is not an issue this community or any community in the world can afford to ignore. Raising awareness with our children is critical,” Mr Geddes said.

The challenge was available on the council website www.qldc.govt.nz and would be widely circulated through various organisations and schools throughout the district.

The council also congratulated the community for all other initiatives to mark the day including: the Wakatipu Trails Trust and the Queenstown Youth Council tree planting project; and the Sustainable Business Seminar on June 6 at Queenstown