International Earth Hour Capital, Kochi short listed.
World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is in a process of selecting Earth Hour Capital from among cities from six different countries. India is the lonely developing country in this list of six countries. From these selected countries altogether 66 cities were selected. Based on a preliminary survey 17 cities have been short listed which include three Indian cities. These cities are New Delhi, Coimbatore and Kochi.Earth Hour City is selected on the basis of the initiatives taken by the city administration for making use of renewable energy as a means to reduce the global warming. They should aim at having low carbon development plans in their cities. From among the cities selected based on the above criteria the best one will be chosen as the International Earth Hour Capital. Also for each country National Earth Hour Capital will be selected.
Kochi was selected, among other things, for its new 'waste – to – energy project', where unsorted waste will be gasified using state – of – art equipment to generate power without creating harmful emission. It is pointed out that Kochi (Nedumbasseri) air port was the first to use solar power to generate electricity for its day-to-day operations.