‘Major cities really matter’: Mayors demand climate action
GLASGOW, SCOTLAND » On a train hurtling toward Glasgow, the mayors of Seattle and Freetown, Sierra Leone, greeted each other like long lost sisters, bonded by years of Zoom calls and collaboration in the fight against climate change.
They lead cities on different sides of the economic and climate divide — one in the cool, northwestern corner of the one of the world’s richest nations; the other the capital of an impover- ished country in the trop- ics of West Africa.
But Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and her Freetown counterpart, Yvonne AkiSawyerr, are both on the front lines of global warming, working to ensure their cities are prepared for rising sea levels, torrential rains and extreme heat.
On Monday, they traveled to the U.N. climate conference in Scotland with a group of big city mayors to demand that world leaders follow the science and act now to head off a catastrophic increase in global temperatures.
Aki-Sawyerr describes herself and mayors as the captains of small boats trying to warn an ocean liner of the dangers ahead.
“I’m going to stand on top of the bow and I’ll be waving my hands furiously and I’m going to be saying, ‘Look over here, you’re hitting an iceberg and you need to stop now,’” she said. “And I’m hoping that there’ll be enough of us doing the same thing for it to make a difference.”
Aki-Sawyerr and Durkan are part of a delegation from the C40 group of big city mayors who are demanding that they be included in decisions about how to combat global warming and mitigate its effects. City leaders will be asked to implement many of the decisions made by presidents and prime ministers, so they should be consulted and receive funds to do the job, the group says.
The delegation also included the mayors of Los Angeles, Paris and London, as well as the Nordic cities of Oslo and Stockholm, and North Dhaka in Bangladesh.
The mayors sought to underscore their environmental credentials by making the 645-kilometer (400mile) journey from London to Glasgow by rail. The electric train they traveled on generates about seven times less greenhouse gas emissions per passenger than flying.
Together, the C40 group’s 97 members are home to more than 700 million people, or almost 10% of the world’s population. Their organization also tries to help local communities, backing a program in which over 1,000 communities supported a campaign for a “net-zero” emissions future.
The mayors aren’t alone in saying that cities will play a big part in the fight against climate change.
More than half the world’s population now live in urban areas, and the trend is only going to continue. Despite the economic shock caused by COVID-19, cities are still seen as gateways to a better life because density and diversity lead to creativity and innovation, said Bernice Lee, director of futures at Chatham House think tank in London.
“Crucially, around 80% of emissions come from the planet’s cities, so they really have to be part of the solutions, and decisions made in major cities really matter,” Lee said. “They can be great environments for both testing and piloting the next generation of solutions.”
The U.N. climate conference, known as COP26, comes just two months after an international panel of climate scientists said time was running out to meet the goal of limiting global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and avert catastrophic climate change.