What we are doing to tackle the current climate crisis isn't enough. But there is someone who is actually doing something: the mayors of the world's major cities.
It is not enough. Nothing that is being done to tackle the climate crisis we find ourselves in today is enough, but if there is anyone who is actually doing something, it is the world's major cities. This is the main message to emerge from the C40 World Mayors Summit, held in Copenhagen from 9 to 11 October.
More than 2,200 people gathered in the Danish capital for the event that the international network of mayors committed to fighting climate change organises every three years. Seventy mayors, a great many public officials, activists, young representatives of the Fridays for Future movement, foundations, businesses, trade unions and media all took part in the three-day discussion on the future we want. An unprecedented and powerful alliance to overcome the greatest challenge of our time.
After months in which the sweeping marches and repeated strikes by millions of young people around the world were met with many declarations of support and equally few concrete actions, for the first time I heard some young activists use words of hope. For the first time it seemed that it was not only they who were giving hope to us, but that they too were receiving it. And for the first time I witnessed, between a movement — one that has everywhere been defined by its declared distance from any institution, party or political side — and political decision-makers, the group of mayors in the C40 network, a closeness and possible understanding.
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I believe there are three reasons for this. The first is the concrete ambition demonstrated by mayors in recent years. A year before the publication of the landmark Ipcc report of 2018, which established the need to stay below one and a half degrees of global warming in order to guarantee a "climate-safe" world, in Mexico City, the majority of mayors in the network endorsed and declared that, in order to implement the Paris Agreement, they would adopt local plans and policies capable of reducing emissions in a manner consistent with the one-and-a-half-degree target.
Today, 106 cities around the world have signed up to this commitment, 11 have already approved radical action plans, and very many others are well on track to do so by the end of 2020. The mayors of the world's great megalopolises thus anticipated an international scientific report and proved far more ambitious than national governments, which even today, in the vast majority of cases, have not equipped themselves with action plans consistent with their own emissions-reduction targets set in Paris in 2015. Naturally, concrete ambition is not confined to commitments and plans, but also encompasses specific actions in the areas of urban development, mobility, energy efficiency, waste management, and food production and distribution — as demonstrated by the new "Good food cities" initiative launched by Milan mayor Giuseppe Sala during the summit.
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To give just one example, if in 2010 the number of zero-emission buses in C40 cities was around one hundred, today that figure has reached 66,000. An exponential increase in a short space of time. Nevertheless, action at the local level too must accelerate and become still more radical.
The second reason is the mayors' collective vision for the next ten years. Again in keeping with the 2018 Ipcc report, which demonstrates that the world has little more than 10 years to put in place "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society" that overcome the ongoing climate crisis and prevent an environmental, economic, social and humanitarian catastrophe without precedent, the new C40 president — the mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti — launched a new global Green New Deal: the idea of making the twenties of the new millennium the decade of climate action. The idea, too, of tackling together the two great emergencies of our time: the climate crisis and the economic crisis, ecological devastation and deep and scandalous inequalities. The idea that one cannot be addressed without the other, that indeed economic and social inequalities and climate change are profoundly linked and caused by the same factors, and that a new politics is needed, starting from the world's major cities, to make our societies more prosperous because they are more just and more sustainable.
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As Mayor Garcetti put it, this vision is present in the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations' Agenda 2030, in the idea of a European ecological and solidarity-based transition, in the Green New Deal of the Sunrise movement and US Senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in the Green Economy of African cities, and so on. What is needed is an energy, environmental, economic, social and cultural revolution that brings together different actors and players. For this reason, the coalition that gathered in Copenhagen to support the global Green New Deal of C40 mayors — from Ocasio-Cortez herself to Fridays for Future activists, from trade unionists of the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) to the most varied businesses, from representatives of informal settlements in the Global South to the United Nations Secretary-General — could truly represent a concrete and tangible turning point in collective action on climate.
The third reason is having placed inclusion and equity at the heart of the vision and of action on climate. The ecological transition must be a just one, otherwise it will not happen at all. Many C40 mayors have understood this. For example, as António Guterres put it very eloquently during the Copenhagen Summit, it is undoubtedly true that renewables now create more jobs than the fossil fuel industry, but the fact remains that it is not easy to explain this to a miner and his family. Moreover, climate change is already today impoverishing the poorest people even further, creating new refugees, sharpening and deepening existing discrimination and inequalities.
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This is why it is so important to put in place environmental policies that bring benefits to all sections of the population, social policies for the people most affected by the impacts of the climate crisis (children, the elderly, the economically weakest and most marginalised groups) and greater investment in education and vocational training. At the end of the Summit, a journalist asked a young Fridays for Future activist from Santiago, Chile, what she was asking of the mayors present in the room, and she replied in a single sentence: act on climate in an inclusive and equitable way and Fridays for Future will follow you.
There is still an enormous amount to be done, and nothing that can be seen today is sufficient. Nevertheless, as Mayor Garcetti said at the close of the summit: "The time for promises is over. The time for action is already under way. We are fighting for nothing less than our right to live, our right to thrive, and our right to leave a better world for our children and our grandchildren. If we come together now – if we deliver a global Green New Deal and make this the decade of action – then I know we will succeed."