As world leaders gather at COP26, city mayors bypass politics to kickstart action
Global News
Cities are both source and victim of the climate crisis. Home to over half the world's population and rising, they create 75 per cent of global CO2 emissions, one report estimates.
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when some national leaders chose to trade blame rather than cooperate, cities around the world were already swapping expertise on social distancing management or mass virus-testing.
As countries gathered at the United Nations COP26 climate conference in Glasgow this week hammer out pacts and issue pledge after pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions, city mayors say they are increasingly using their own networks to tackle climate change, bypassing national politics to kickstart action on the ground.
“National governments are slow to communicate — very bureaucratic, internally and between each other. We’re just mayors,” said Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, who chairs the C40 global network of mayors for tackling climate change.
Cities are both source and victim of the climate crisis. Home to over half the world’s population and rising, they create 75 per cent of global CO2 emissions, notably from transport and buildings, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates.
Garcetti said in an interview that he was under no illusion that action at local government level could ever be a substitute for the global emission-cutting pacts needed to avert a climate catastrophe.
Instead, the aim was for town halls to leverage their often chunky resources and mandates – from levying local taxes to the policing of building regulations and waste management – to help make sure that those pacts actually lead to results, he said.
Launched in 2005 by 18 big cities, C40 gained momentum after Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the 2015 Paris Agreement on curbing emissions. At an event on the sidelines of COP26 it announced it now includes 1,049 towns covering over 700 million citizens and a quarter of the global economy.
Members have to prove they are contributing to the overall goal of halving net carbon emissions by the end of the decade en route to net-zero by 2050 — the deadline scientists say must be met to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
