Secret weapon in fight against climate change: mayors

(The Christian Science Monitor) When a coalition of mayors from around the world gathered at the Vatican this week to discuss their role in addressing climate change, many of them proclaimed it was up to local leaders like them to take the reins in cutting global emissions.

Later this year, delegations from national governments are preparing to gather for the major United Nations climate conference in Paris. But whereas they will negotiate important new “top down” global carbon-emission protocols, the mayors of major cities—from New York to Johannesburg, South Africa, to Beijing—are taking the “bottom up” approach. And in working to effect change at the local level, they’ve been at the vanguard of reducing emissions throughout the world in the past decade.

It is big cities, after all, that consume two-thirds of the world’s energy and then pump out more than 70 percent of the globe’s human-made carbon, according to many studies. What’s more, rising sea levels and more severe weather patterns—some of the possible effects of climate change, many scientist say—could pose a particular threat to cities, since nine out of ten major urban areas in the world are near coastal regions.