UNFCCC Lighthouse Award Projects Presentation - 4PCCD project leader Vanesa Castan Broto third from the right. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

By Silvia Giannelli
WARSAW, Nov 22 2013 (IPS)

In Maputo, a port city on the Indian Ocean in Mozambique, 44 percent of the 1.2 million inhabitants live in poverty, making them even more vulnerable to the effects of sea level rise, floods and cyclones. But despite their severe poverty, their day-to-day experience gives them practical knowledge on how to deal with climate change effects.

The Public Private People Partnership for Climate Compatible Development (4PCCD) received the prestigious UNFCCC climate convention Lighthouse Award at the Nov. 11-22 COP19 climate change summit in Warsaw.

The 4PCCD, declared one of the 2013 Lighthouse Activities under the U.N. Momentum for Change initiative, brought together the national government, local authorities and citizens in the construction of strategies to boost resilience against climate change in Maputo.

“Relating to their own experiences, citizens showed they had a good understanding of climate change,” Vanesa Castan Broto, 4PCCD project leader, explained during her presentation at COP19 in Warsaw.

“Thanks to the mediation of local facilitators, local residents could discuss and develop adaptation plans that are feasible and sustainable: organising waste collection, constructing toilet blocks, fixing leaky pipes, etc.”

This is just one example of clashing realities inside the National Stadium, where the 19th Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is coming to an end.

While hopes for relevant outcomes from the negotiations are fading away and national governments seem to have reached a stalemate, the success of small, bottom-up projects like the 4PCCD has brought fresh air to the corridors of the conference.

On Thursday, cities and local authorities took the stage in what was the first ‘Cities Day’ ever celebrated during a COP – an initiative by the COP presidency, the UNFCCC secretariat, the city of Warsaw and ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability and partners.

In fact, cities were for the first time allowed to participate in the official negotiations, under the “Friends of the Cities” group at UNFCCC.

“We are opening up a dialogue at the national level, between national governments and cities, on what they can collectively do if they all use their maximum efforts, and what the private sector role can be in that process,” David Cadman, president of ICLEI, told IPS.

“Half of the world population lives in cities. By the end of the century 90 percent will, and we are going to build more in the next 40 years than we’ve built in all of humanity,” he continued. “So if we don’t build it right, then it’s going to be a draw on energy, and the form of energy will probably be a dirty one.”

Around 12,000 cities and towns already joined ICLEI’s network and decided to take concrete action on mitigation, adaptation, urban biodiversity, ecological purchasing, and ecomobility.

“When everyone said it was very difficult to have an MRV [measurable, reportable, verifiable] greenhouse gas [GHG] reduction plan, we put it in place,” he said. “And we’ve got a software that cities can now use to measure GHGs and we are seeing really dramatic drops: in 107 municipalities they’re exceeding one percent lowering of GHGs per year.”

Yet, according to Cadman, better coordination among local and national authorities is necessary to obtain greater results: “The most interesting study on this has been done by the city of London, which basically said ‘we can get a 30 percent reduction of CO2 if we use all of our facilities. But if simultaneously we had these actions from the national government, we could get to 60-80 percent’. The limits [of local authorities] depend on what your sources of energy are.”

And ICLEI is not the only network of cities engaged in tackling climate change.
The Climate Alliance (CA) of European Cities with Indigenous Rainforest Peoples is another example of cross-national cooperation, where European member cities and municipalities aim to reduce GHGs at their source.

“When they become a member of CA,” Thomas Brose, from the European Secretariat of CA, explained to IPS, “they commit to the following goals: reduce CO2 emissions by 10 percent every five years, halve per capita emissions by 2030 at the latest [from a 1990 baseline], preserve the tropical rainforests by avoiding the use of tropical timber, and support projects and initiatives of the indigenous partners.”

Their alliance with indigenous communities through the Coordinadora de las Organizaciones Indígenas de la Cuenca Amazónica – COICA (Coordinator of Indigenous Organisations of the Amazon River Basin) is based on an acknowledgment that while industrialised countries are mainly responsible for climate change, its effects will largely impact populations that live in ecologically sensitive areas.

Furthermore, protecting those areas is crucial to reducing the greenhouse effect.

“Destruction of forests worldwide is responsible for about 17 percent of GHG emissions. Effective protection of this environment will only be achieved if we integrate the people who live in these environments into our protection strategies,” Brose told IPS.

At the foundation of these networks is the warning by scientists that time is running out and concrete action is needed if we are to stay below the two degree C threshold of temperature rise and avoid catastrophic consequences. Yet, cities and local governments need to be included in an international framework.

“They need to be included in the legal frameworks on energy, housing or transportation,” Brose underlined. “And they also need financial support programmes to implement and develop their activities.”

Hopefully, the participation of local authorities in the UNFCCC process is a good sign that such inclusion is about to happen.

“Whereas national governments have been somewhat slow in terms of establishing national goals, and in achieving those goals, cities have been establishing and exceeding local goals. Cities can, and are, leading this process,” Cadman concluded.

Part of the Sustainable Urban Masterplan for Shanghai, this image shows the channels with pedestrian and slow traffic lanes on the right, and urban food gardens on the left. The channel transports water from vertical farm to vertical farm, cooling the city and being filtered through various plants and organisms along the way. Credit: Except Integrated/cc by 2.0

By Stephen Leahy
NANTES, France, Oct 5 2013 (IPS)

With presidents and prime ministers failing to take meaningful action to avert a planetary-scale climate crisis, the mayors of cities and towns are increasingly stepping up to enact changes at the local level.

“Cities are on the front lines of climate change,” Richard Register, founder and president of Ecocity Builders, an organisation that pioneered ecological city design and planning, told IPS.

With the backing of their residents, many cities and towns around the world are becoming cleaner, greener and better places to live by banning cars, improving mass transit, reducing energy use and growing their own food while adding public and green spaces.

“Getting cities right solves many problems,” Register said.

Cities are truly ground zero for action on climate change, protection of ecosystems, biodiversity, energy use, food production and more because that’s where most people live today, he said. Cities consume about 75 percent of the world’s energy and resources. They are directly or indirectly responsible for 75 percent of global carbon emissions.

By 2050, 75 percent of the world’s 9.5 billion people will live in cities. The urban areas to house this huge increase amounts to more than all the building humanity has ever done. Nearly all of this new building will be in the developing world.

“All of this new urban infrastructure must be done right,” said David Cadman, a city councillor from Vancouver, Canada and president of ICLEI, the only network of sustainable cities operating worldwide and which counts 1,200 local governments as members.

ICLEI members have committed to reduce their carbon emissions by 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050.

“Cities are major players in issues like energy, climate, sustainable food production,” Cadman told IPS.

Climate change is a “five-alarm fire and hardly any national government is taking the needed actions”, he said. On top of that, national governments largely ignore the role of cities and only recently granted them 10 minutes of speaking time at the annual U.N. climate negotiations to create a new global treaty.

“We continue to have the political courage to act,” said Anna Tenje, deputy mayor of the small Swedish city of Växjö, which slashed its carbon emissions 40 percent and aims to be Europe’s greenest city.

Växjö was a very polluted region in the 1960s, but the public and business community backed efforts to re-invent it as a green city. People now fish and swim in the once polluted lakes that surround the city, she said at the 10th Ecocity, the World Summit on Sustainable Cities, a recent conference that drew more than 2,000 mayors, local officials and members of civil society to Nantes.

Växjö is doing also every well economically, Tenje said, proving that cutting emissions is not a burden.

All new apartment blocks are so well-insulated they don’t need furnaces for heat. Solar panels have been installed in schools and on the roof of City Hall. A biogas plant produces vehicle fuel from sewage and school food leftovers, while another larger plant using domestic waste as its feedstock is under construction.

The city aims to be fossil fuel-free by 2030 and has launched a major effort to get people out of their cars by making public transit, walking and cycling more enjoyable than driving, the deputy mayor said.

Last year’s landmark sustainability summit Rio+20 in Brazil chose “The Future We Want” as its motto. While little was accomplished in Rio, some cities and towns were already creating the future they want, said Andrew Simms, a climate economist at Global Witness and fellow of the New Economics Foundation in the UK.

Around the world, cites and towns are creating their version of what Simm’s nine-year-old daughter calls ‘Happyville’:  Green, sustainable places with thriving local economies and healthy, prosperous lifestyles for all residents, Simms told IPS.

Many Danish cities get their energy from wind, and the Belgian city of Ghent doubled the number of bikes on streets in less than 10 years with the dream of becoming car-free. Citizens in the Brazilian city of Puerto Alegre have weekly neighbourhood meetings to discuss how the city budget will be spent, resulting in a big improvement in services.

Cities can also grow much of their own food, Simms said, noting that Havana’s urban gardens grow half the city’s fresh fruit and vegetables. New York City estimates it has 4,000 acres on which it too could grow food. The city of Boulder, Colorado is working towards producing all of its own food.

Skyrocketing resource use fuelled by overconsumption remains a major challenge, but here too cities have a major role to play. The Brazilian mega-city of Sao Paulo banned billboards and transit advertising, while Europe’s premier city, Paris, has reduced such advertising by 30 percent to beautify the cityscape and de-emphasise material consumption.

Simms says that public spiritedness has become rarer in cultures bombarded by 180 ads a day telling people all they need to be happy is to buy stuff.

The only barriers to every village, town and city becoming ‘Happyville’ are a lack of political courage and self-interest dominating public interest, he said.

The melting of Mexico’s Orizaba glacier is another consequence of global warming. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
NANTES, France, Sep 27 2013 (IPS)

Greenland will eventually truly become green as most of its massive ice sheet is destined to melt, the authoritative U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported Friday.

The IPCC’s new 36-page summary of the latest science includes a warning that there is a 20-percent chance the massive Greenland ice sheet will begin an irreversible meltdown with only 0.2 degrees C of additional warming. That amount of additional warming is now certain. However, it would take 1,000 years for all the ice to melt."Every word in the 36 pages has been debated. Some paragraphs were discussed for over an hour." -- Thomas Stocker, co-chair of IPCC Working Group I

“The new report is yet another wake-up call saying we are in deep trouble and heading for dangerous levels of climate change,” said David Cadman, president of ICLEI , the only network of sustainable cities operating worldwide and involving  1,200 local governments.

“The IPCC will be attacked by fossil fuel interests and their supporters….They will try and scare the public that taking action puts jobs and the economy at risk,” Cadman told IPS. “That’s simply not true. It’s the opposite.”

Overwhelming evidence

The IPCC’s summary of its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) released in Stockholm clearly states that humans are warming the planet, confirming previous reports dating back to 1997. Since the 1950s, every decade following has been warmer than the previous one, it says.

“Temperatures between 1983 and 2012 are the warmest in the past 1,400 years [in the Northern Hemisphere],” said Thomas Stocker, co-chair of the IPCC Working Group I.

In response to media reports about a so-called “warming hiatus”, Stocker said the climate system is dynamic, with more heat likely going into oceans in recent years and slightly slowing the rate of surface temperature increases.

The science around climate change is well established. More than 100 years ago, researchers demonstrated that carbon dioxide (CO2) traps heat from the sun. Burning fossil fuels, deforestation and other human activities put additional CO2 into the atmosphere, where it remains essentially forever. That additional CO2 is trapping additional heat, as it acts like another layer of insulation.

More than 90 percent of this additional heat energy is being absorbed by the oceans, according to the AR5, officially known as the Summary for Policy Makers. This explains why temperatures at the surface are not higher than today’s global average increase of 0.8 C.

The summary highlights the fact that the decrease in Arctic sea ice over the last three decades is “unprecedented” in the last 1,450 years. This year’s summer sea ice melt was less than last year’s record, but it still was the sixth lowest ever measured. The report says the Arctic is on track to be ice-free in summer before 2050, much sooner than previous reports projected.

A cautious consensus

The AR5 is a five-year effort by hundreds of scientists from 39 countries to assess, evaluate and synthesise the findings of 9,200 peer-reviewed scientific studies published since the last review in 2007, called the AR4. The IPCC does not do any research itself and is run by 110 governments who spent the last four days approving the final wording of the summary.

“Every word in the 36-pages has been debated. Some paragraphs were discussed for over an hour,” Stocker said at a press conference in Stockholm.  “No other science report has ever undergone such critical scrutiny.”

The 2000-plus page full report of Working Group I on the physical science underlying climate change will be published Monday. That is the first of four IPCC reports to be released in the coming year.

The cautiously-worded Summary for Policy Makers details and confirms the observed impacts such as increased temperatures, precipitation changes, weather extremes and more. It also confirms these and other impacts will worsen as CO2 emissions increase. Current CO2 emissions levels are at the top of the worst-case scenario.

“Do not misunderstand the low end of the temperature and other ranges in the report,” said Michel Jarraud, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organisation.

“Those are only possible if we completely stop emitting CO2,” Jarraud said.

The AR5 summary says the Greenland ice sheet lost an average of 215 billion tonnes of ice a year between 2002 and 2011. More recent studies show the ice lost has increased substantially since that time.

According to AR5, there is a one in five chance the Greenland ice sheet will melt entirely if global temperatures climb from 0.8C to more than 1.0C as is now inevitable. One of the reasons is that temperature increases in the Arctic are nearly three times higher than global average.

The 50-50 point for an unstoppable meltdown of Greenland leading to a seven-metre sea level rise is less than 4.0C.

Despite this, the AR5 says global sea level rise is not expected to be greater than one metre this century, higher than the 2007 estimate. Other scientists, including James Hansen, former head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, say the observed accelerated melting of the Arctic, Greenland, Antarctic and world’s glaciers is a sign that a multi-metre rise in sea levels is possible this century unless emissions decline.

“Climate denialists”

Even before the IPCC’s new report was made public, it was attacked and misrepresented by “climate change denialists” trying to paint its findings as radical or extreme, said Charles Greene, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University in New York State.

Greene is referring to a well-documented propaganda effort by some in the fossil fuel industry as well as extremist right-wing organisations attempting to confuse the public about the reality and urgency of global warming.

“In fact, the IPCC has a long track record of underestimating impacts” of climate change, Green said.

While global action remains gridlocked, some cities are already cutting their carbon emissions. ICLEI’s members are committed to a 20-percent reduction by 2020 and 80-percent reductions by 2050.

Most national governments are failing to lead which clearly reveals the power and influence of the fossil fuel sector, Cadman says. “Cities could do 10 times more but they simply don’t have the money.”