The news, which New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg will deliver along with Rio de Janeiro Mayor Eduardo Paes at this week's Rio+20 Earth Summit, highlights the fractured policymaking landscape that defines environmental issues today. While more than 130 world leaders will try to hammer out a negotiated statement in Rio by week's end about their sustainable development goals, many of the concrete steps are being taking by community leaders.
“We're not arguing with each other about emissions targets," Bloomberg told reporters in a teleconference Monday. “What we're doing is going out and making progress."
The C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group — a network of 59 cities, including Los Angeles; Tokyo; Bogota, Colombia; and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia — was launched in 2005 to provide support for mayors hoping to cut greenhouse-gas emissions in urban centers across the globe. The group analyzed data from 48 cities to determine a suite of policies that are now in place to cut 248 million tons of greenhouse gases, the equivalent of taking 44 million passenger vehicles off the road for a year.
The 59 cities of the group, Bloomberg added, have the capacity to cut their carbon output by 1 gigaton, or a billion tons, by 2030 compared with business as usual. That reduction, which could be achieved through steps such as the capture of methane from urban landfills and installation of more-efficient lighting and energy-efficient building codes, would be equivalent to the combined greenhouse-gas emissions of Canada and Mexico.
“This is not only a central government problem," Paes told reporters, adding that when world leaders gathered in his city two decades ago for the first Rio Earth summit, “it was a nice discussion, we set out some goals, but I don't think we got much better." Read the full report here.
Source: by Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post.
