Given that the world’s 40 biggest cities account for eight percent of the global population and 12 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, local governments play an increasingly important role in confronting climate change.

São Paulo is one of the world's most populous cities. Credit: Adam Jones - Creative Commons

This was one of the conclusions reached at the fourth C40 Cities Mayors Summit, organised by the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40) in São Paulo, Brazil May 31 to Jun. 3.

The summit culminated in the signing of an agreement to establish a common standard for measuring greenhouse gas emissions and another with the World Bank to facilitate financing for environmental projects in urban areas.

The C40 member cities are Addis Ababa, Athens, Bangkok, Beijing, Berlin, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Caracas, Chicago, Dhaka, Hanoi, Houston, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Karachi, Lagos, Lima, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Melbourne, Mexico City, Moscow, Mumbai, New Delhi, New York, Paris, Philadelphia, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, São Paulo, Seoul, Shanghai, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto and Warsaw.

“The leaders of C40 Cities – the world’s megacities – hold the future in their hands,” said New York City mayor and C40 chair Michael Bloomberg.

Every two years, the group’s members meet to present and evaluate the results of their initiatives. The first summit was held in London in 2005, the second in New York in 2007, and the third in Seoul in 2009.

At this year’s summit in São Paulo, the C40 and ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, an association of over 1,200 local governments, signed an agreement to establish a global standard for accounting and reporting community-scale greenhouse gas emissions.

“Establishing a single global standard for reporting greenhouse gas emissions will empower local governments to accelerate their actions and access funding for mitigation and adaptation projects,” said Bloomberg.

In addition, Bloomberg and World Bank Group president Robert Zoellick signed a “groundbreaking” agreement aimed at helping cities accelerate current actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and become more resilient to climate change. The World Bank Group has allocated 15 billion dollars to C40 cities, and another five billion has been granted in long-term loans at an interest of one percent annually for climate-related initiatives. Combined with other sources of financing, a total of 50 billion dollars would be made available, of which 30 percent is earmarked for private sector initiatives.

The conditions for accessing these funds vary. Priority is placed on infrastructure development and poverty reduction. To provide more information on the different mechanisms and sources of financing, a platform has been created to offer guidance on financial options available for climate action in developing countries, at http://www.climatefinanceoptions.org.

Speaking to the delegations from 47 cities gathered in São Paulo, Zoellick stressed that the World Bank Group wants to facilitate changes in the right direction, and that the establishment of specific targets and a common standard to measure their achievement will enable it to provide more effective support.

While this support “is fundamental, it is important to study ways for local governments to directly access these lines of credit. If we depend on national governments, it could complicate matters,” Mauricio Macri, the mayor of Buenos Aires, told Tierramérica.

One of the featured speakers at the summit was Bill Clinton, former president of the United States (1993-2001) and founder of the Clinton Climate Initiative, which has worked in partnership with C40 since 2006.

Clinton’s address focused on ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, specifically highlighting the need to curb landfill emissions of methane gas.

When organic wastes in landfills decompose they produce methane, which is one of the greenhouse gases contributing to global warming, but can also be harnessed to generate energy. This represents another potential source of revenue, in addition to the recycling of plastic, glass and wood from landfills.

“The financing has not been available for these things because they have been looked at as eyesores, not goldmines,” said Clinton. “World Bank financing may give us the chance to do something historic.”

Curbing pollution and adapting to the effects of climate change require major investments, particularly considering the need for new technology in large construction projects.

But big cities have also found simple measures that offer significant results. In the Australian city of Melbourne, for example, the local government offers free transportation until seven in the morning, to reduce the use of private vehicles and take advantage of the public transport vehicles that usually sit idle during these hours.

Another initiative presented at the summit is a programme adopted in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, in which drivers leave their cars at home one day a week. Participants in the programme place a sticker on their vehicle indicating the day they have agreed not to drive, and sensors monitor whether or not they have complied with their commitment.

Those who comply receive discounts of five percent on their vehicle tax fees and 8.7 percent on insurance premiums, as well as discounts on fuel and other services. If the radar sensors detect a vehicle being driven on the prohibited day three times, these benefits are revoked.

Initiatives highlighted by the summit’s hosts included dedicated lanes for buses, taxis, and bicycles; the recovery of streams and rivers; the creation of strips of parkland between buildings and along highways and river banks; the expansion of green areas to increase rainwater absorption and reduce temperatures; and the use of renewable fuels.

Planting trees in accordance with the number of inhabitants of a city is another fairly widespread measure. For instance, Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, is currently investing in urban forests, the recovery of gallery forests and the renovation of housing, concentrating homes in complexes on smaller areas of land to free up space for parks and urban infrastructure.

Amsterdam has its own fund for climate projects. “We have achieved many things, but when we look at the big picture, we see that there is a lot left to do,” Lodewijk Asscher, the mayor of Amsterdam, told Tierramérica.

The C40 summits provide a forum for the exchange of experiences, both successes and failures, and the discussion of shared and individual goals. Seoul hopes to transform 10,000 buildings into green buildings by 2030, Austin has a zero waste plan for 2040, London aims to have 100,000 electric vehicles on the streets by 2020, and Tokyo is introducing higher energy efficiency standards for large urban developments.

*Envolverde correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Innovation aimed at promoting small-scale crop-based energy and research intended to speed up production of the second generation of biofuels are Brazil's central tactics to revive what has been waning international enthusiasm for ethanol and biofuel.

Bio-energy research using a molecular reactor. - Photo Stock

Scientists around the globe have been researching alternative viable energy sources for some time now. Brazil, which stood out in 1975 with its National Fuel Alcohol Program and in 2005 for its pioneering National Biodiesel Program, is wielding new strategies in its global offensive for fuels based on distilled agricultural products.

Scientific progress is opening space for agro-fuels to become a new commodity to conquer the global market.

To achieve it, Brazil is investing in research that could be the answer to concerns about the negative effects of crop-based fuel production on food supplies and prices, and on the conservation of its jungles.

The National Economic and Social Development Bank (BNDES) joined the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) to carry out the study, “Sugarcane-Based Bioethanol: Energy for Sustainable Development.”

The research says that to produce some 50 billion liters of sugarcane ethanol per year uses crops from 15 million hectares, that is, one percent of the land area currently farmed on the entire planet, estimated at 1.5 billion hectares.

This represents an average yield of 3,300 liters of ethanol per hectare, which only proves Brazil's leadership in this sector, as that country produces an average of 6,600 liters per hectare. The best Brazilian ethanol refineries even reach output of 7,500 liters per hectare, according to the National Union of Sugarcane Industries.

The yields should become greater with second-generation ethanol, made from cellulose. The process makes use of various types of organic waste, like sugarcane pulp. In five to 10 years, output could reach 13,000 liters per hectare, which could alleviate pressure to farm new land, according to some studies.

It is not yet known if the sector will be dominated by big investors, which could cause social disintegration by pushing small farmers off their land, or if there will be space for an inclusive process that generates income for smaller producers and improves their living conditions.

The answer could also lie in technology, which provides ways to produce fuel on a smaller scale, appropriate for family farms. This is the purpose of Intelligent Social Fuel Refineries (USI).

They are small biological refineries developed by the USI industrial director, Orci Ribeiro, who learned everything he knows from hands-on experience.

With such a refinery, a small farmer can produce ethanol from sugarcane, sweet potato, manioc or sorghum, said Ribeiro, who also developed an ethanol-fueled electrical generator so that far-flung rural communities can produce their own electricity.

This solution awoke much interest at the First International Exposition held here Nov. 17-21, where six fuel distilleries were sold to Colombia, and a partnership agreement was signed with the Movement of Small Family Farmers of Brazil.

Another innovation presented at the expo was a mobile biodiesel distillery, which can be transported on a truck. It was designed by chemist Diego Luiz Nunes, professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais.

We are in a period of transition, says Nunes. “Solid fuels are more efficient, and little by little we should adopt them for mass transport vehicles,” he told Tierramérica.

Examples are the Eletra bus, which runs with a combination of biodiesel and electric battery, and was exhibited at the expo along with the already known Flex motor vehicles, the Ipanema plane, as well as tractors, motorcycles and other vehicles adapted to run on fuel alcohol.

Ethanol and biodiesel have the advantage that they can be distributed through the existing global system, as pointed out by the president of the fuel division of Brazilian oil giant Petrobras, Alan Kardec Pinto, speaking at the International Conference on Biofuels, held in conjunction with the expo.

“The energy matrix needs to be diversified. Oil is going to run out,” Kardec told the delegations from 92 countries.

Environmental and social activists, government authorities and business owners have insisted on the need to analyze the entire production cycle of crop-based fuels.

“We can work together,” said the director of the African Fund for Biofuels and Renewable Energies, Thierno Bocar Tall, expressing the optimism of representatives from African countries.

Lúcia Melo, president of Brazil's Center for Strategic Management and Research, said her country can and should attract more research centers, post-graduate courses and foreign companies to evaluate fuels that would be appropriate for resolving social, economic and environmental problems.

The Brazilian government insisted that national technology is viable, reduces emissions that cause climate change and is based on renewable raw materials, without competing with food production.

The federal government's Cabinet chief, Dilma Rousseff, assured that agro-ecological land-use zoning of the country would be carried out with citizen participation, protecting the Amazon, the vast Pantanal wetlands, and other valuable ecosystems. However, it is not clear that it will be done in a timely way, nor that it will be respected by the private sector.

The environmental risks of monoculture for producing biofuel and the need to reduce consumption in general were highlighted by environmental and other non-governmental organizations.

The critics of the current dominant production model convened a parallel meeting where they released a report from the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analyses (IBASE) that points out the risks of contamination from the use of fertilizers and smoke pollution from burning off sugarcane fields, and the danger of worsening the illegal labor relations that exist on many large farms — long-standing problems of rural Brazil.