News and Flashes 2010
Representatives of Bojanala Platinum District Municipality as well as from Ho Municipal Assembly in Ghana visited Lahti in the beginning of August 2010. The programme of the working visit concentrated mainly on capacity building and technical expertise transfer on waste management solutions.
The working visit of the delegation from BPDM concentrated on water protection and environmental awareness raising issues.
During the working visit in Lahti, the BPDM delegation was joined with the delegation from Ho Municipal Assembly. Ho Municipal Assembly has been a new North-South cooperation partner of the City of Lahti since the beginning of 2010.
The City of Lahti will be broadening its North-South Cooperation for the year 2010 with an inclusion of a new cooperation partner, Ho Municipal Assembly, Ghana. The City of Ho has been involved in the North-South cooperation since 2005 with the City of Järvenpää.
Related to the cooperation, an advanced automatic monitoring station was shipped from Finland to Hartbeespoort Dam. The station is monitoring the water quality of the dam in the deepest point (32 m) vertically in six depths from surface to bottom.
The year 2010 of the cooperation programme begins with new activities and new cooperation coordinators. During 2010, waste management will be an important cooperation component.
The Lahti- Bojanala-Platinum cooperation was introduced as a case study in the UCLG Position Paper on Aid Effectiveness and Local Government.
Two officials from BPDM conducted a peer review of the new Climate Programme of the Lahti Region in August-September 2009. The reviewers got acquainted with the topic, assessed the newly introduced climate protection programme of Lahti Region and gave recommendations on how to improve the programme.
A delegation from BPDM explored the Sustainable Development and Consumption Centre of Lahti and the Environmental Information and Communication Centre of Vodokanal, St. Petersburg in June 2009.
A delegation from the Municipality of Hollola visited the Municipality of Moses Kotane in March 2009 in order to strengthen the willingness for cooperation.
The cooperation has been supporting the planning and implementation of a greening and waste minimization program for the Rustenburg 2010 Football World Cup.
Our joint application for implementation of cooperation in 2008-2010
between Bojanala Platinum District Municipality, South Africa, and City of
Lahti, Finland, was approved by the Association of Finnish Local and
Regional Authorities in early May.
Climate Change and increased occurance of factual lack of energy and water ressources are a reality. The South African government has over the past recent years passed a number of over all policies aimed at reducing the negative impact on climate and improving the utilisation of the natural ressources.
Rationale
At the Millennium Summit in September 2000, world leaders agreed on an ambitious agenda.
Events