Broke, remote and deprived of jobs -- just 25 years ago, the border town of Guessing close to Hungary was one of the poorest in Austria, a forgotten frontier along the Iron Curtain trail. Yet today, the municipality of 4,000 people has morphed into a global flagship model for green energy, after becoming the first community in the European Union to produce all its heat and power from renewable sources back in 2001. Latest figures show the town is already 80 percent carbon neutral, a clear frontrunner in the bloc's race for reducing C02 emissions.
"The whole world should become Guessing," enthused Austria's most famous green advocate, Arnold Schwarzenegger, during a visit two years ago. In many ways, it all began with a "pile of rotting wood", said engineer Reinhold Koch, one of the masterminds behind the dramatic transformation.
While Guessing lacked a motorway and train lines, there was one thing it had in abundance: forests and therefore timber leftovers from logging companies. "A major reason why we were so poor in the early 1990s was because we spent millions on buying foreign fossil fuels, while wood offcuts were decaying on the ground," Koch told AFP in an interview ahead of crunch climate change talks in Paris.
"I realised that the solution was right in front of our eyes. We could produce our own energy and thereby keep the money here." This, Koch hoped, would also put an end to the mass exodus Guessing was facing at the time.
Some 70 percent of the region's 27,000 inhabitants were forced to commute to the capital Vienna for work as a consequence of having been cut off from industrial development for several decades.
