World mayors sign climate change pact
by Agence France-Presse.
MEXICO CITY—Mayors from around the world signed a
voluntary pact Sunday in Mexico City to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at a
meeting meant as a precursor to U.N.-sponsored climate talks in Cancun opening
next week.
The gathering in one of the world’s most polluted cities assembled
thousands of local and regional leaders to discuss a wide range of economic
and social issues, including climate change.
Participants from some 135 cities and urban areas—including Buenos
Aires, Bogota, Johannesburg, Los Angeles, Paris, and Vancouver—signed the
pact, which states their intention to adopt a slate of measures to stem
climate
change.
Each city “will have to register its climate data [commitments as well as
performance] in the city climate record” during the next eight months, said
Gabriel Sanchez, president of Think Foundation, a Mexican nonprofit.
Residents will be able to track their cities’ performance online,
officials
said.
The pact will be presented at U.N. talks in the Mexican resort of Cancun
from
Nov. 29 to Dec. 10.
Sunday’s signing came a day after the close of the third conference of
the
United Cities and Local Governments, attended by mayors, legislators, and
officials from more than 1,000 cities and towns in 114 countries.
Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard said his counterparts should seize the
opportunity ahead of Cancun to highlight their key roles in the fight to put
the brakes on climate change.
“We have to tell the international community that it’s in the cities that
the battle to slow global warming will be won,” Ebrard said in the lead-up
to
the meeting.
And he has brought the battle to his doorstep; the leftist Ebrard pledged
last week that Mexico City, with its teeming population of more than 20
million, would reduce its annual greenhouse gas emissions by around 14
percent.
The mayors emphasized the vital role that cities, where more than half
the
world’s population now live, can play in the fight against climate change.
Urban areas consume up to 80 percent of global energy production and emit
60 percent of greenhouse gases, according to Christiana Figueres, head of
the
U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The pact sent a “clear signal” to countries that will sit at the
negotiating table in Cancun that it is possible to reach agreement, Figueres
said.
Meanwhile, a new study released on Sunday found that fossil-fuel gases
edged back less than hoped in 2009, as falls in advanced economies were
largely outweighed by rises in China and India.
Annual global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the burning of oil,
gas, and coal were 30.8 billion tonnes, a retreat of only 1.3 percent in 2009
compared with 2008, a record year, they said in a letter to the journal
Nature
Geoscience.
The decrease was less than half what had been expected, because emerging
giant economies were unaffected by the downturn that hit many large
industrialized nations.
In addition, they burned more coal, the biggest source of fossil-fuel
carbon, while their economies struggled with a higher “carbon intensity,” a
measure of fuel-efficiency.
Emissions of fossil-fuel gases in 2009 fell by 11.8 percent in Japan, by
6.9 percent in the United States, by 8.6 percent in Britain, by 7.0 percent
in
Germany, and by 8.4 percent in Russia, the paper said.
In contrast, they rose by eight percent in China, the world’s number one
emitter of fossil-fuel CO2, which accounts for a whopping 24 percent of the
total.
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