Cities hope new emissions push will spur climate ambition

BONN, Germany: Mayors from 25 cities around the world, representing 150 million citizens, pledged on Sunday to cut their carbon emissions to net zero by 2050, while boosting efforts to become more resilient to extreme weather and other pressures linked to climate change.

They pledged to put in place by 2020 their new, ambitious climate action plans, to be developed with help from the C40 Cities network.

The cities – spanning the globe from Accra to London to Rio de Janeiro – will also make clear to their residents the wider social, environmental and economic benefits of stepping up climate action.

In addition, C40, which supports cities in tackling climate change, will aid nine large African cities, including Cape Town, Addis Ababa, Lagos and Nairobi, to craft long-term green plans that align with the goals of the 2015 Paris deal to curb global warming, with backing from the German government.

“African cities are playing a leading and decisive role in delivering on the ambition of the Paris Agreement,” Paris Mayor and C40 chair Anne Hidalgo said in a statement.

Separately, the almost 7,500 cities in the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy said their commitments combined would equal the reduction of nearly 1.3 billion tonnes of carbon emissions per year by 2030 – the size of Japan or Brazil’s emissions, said Christiana Figueres, vice chair of the alliance.

It also launched a new global standard for measuring and reporting emissions from cities and local governments, to be applied from 2018.

The aim is to give national governments “very stringent and robust information” so that as 2020 draws near – the time by which they need to have peaked emissions to keep climate change in check – they can “increase their ambition safely and with confidence because so much has actually been achieved by the cities already”, said former UNclimate chief Figueres.

Bonn, for example, has recently put in smart street lighting that only switches on when someone passes by, together with a system that detects when recycling bins for clothing and glass are full, so that they are emptied only when needed. — AFP