The Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality walked away with R250 000 at an Arbor City Awards handover event on Monday in Johannesburg. First prize went to the eThekwini Municipality which won the coveted R300 000.
The Gauteng MEC of Agriculture and Rural Development, Ms Nandi Mayathula Khoza, accepted the award on behalf of the Johannesburg Metro Municipality.
The Arbor City Award Competition forms part of a partnership programme between the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF) and the Institute for Environment and Recreation Management (IERM), which aims to encourage and reward municipalities that are doing their best to green their surroundings. The competition is sponsored by TOTAL South Africa.
In recent years, municipalities have made great strides to expand the greening of their surrounding areas to also include our townships.
“The 2013 Arbor City Awards involved 33 municipalities that were found eligible to enter. The main objective of the competition is to encourage municipalities to undertake greening initiatives. However, we have also gone to great lengths to ensure that greening efforts extend to previously disadvantaged areas too,” said Minister Joemat-Pettersson.
To win, municipalities had to fulfil a number of requirements, among these were a portfolio of evidence showing a greening policy or strategy, a tree register, maintenance plans and budget; a portfolio of evidence in videos or pictures depicting projects, sites, special trees; and a narrative not exceeding two pages explaining why the municipality hopes to be the winner of the Arbor City Award 2013.
The other objectives of the Arbor City Awards include promoting the development of provincial and local greening plans, extending greening in local municipalities to previously disadvantaged areas, ensuring compliance with relevant greening legislation, raising general awareness on the importance and value of trees in residential settlements and providing incentives to local authorities that go an extra mile to green their areas.
The other awards were the Local Municipality Awards. The other winners were the Drakenstein Municipality, which walked away with the first prize award of R300 000. The second prize went to the Langeberg Municipality, which received a R200 000 award.
