Last week’s UN Climate Summit saw hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, 125 heads of state and hundreds of business leaders converge on New York City for the most encouraging movement on climate action in years. For a movement that often stalls out in pessimism and fatigue, these events represented a surprising shift of tone — and a few reasons for hope.
Climate Week — the several days of UN meetings and associated rallies – opened with the biggest climate related demonstration in history. The September 21 People’s Climate March drew 400,000 marchers to the streets of New York and inspired companion rallies in 162 cities around the world. Inside, multinational business leaders announced their support for carbon pricing, as well as commitments to new initiatives to switch to renewable energy and reduce deforestation, and a compact of mayors from 2,000 cities announced a new package of commitments to reduce emissions by 454 megatons by 2020 even as urban areas are set to grow from 60 to 70 percent of the world’s population.
These initiatives are all part of a push to build momentum in anticipation of the global negotiations to begin this winter in Lima under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The goal of the UN negotiations, which will culminate in Paris late next year, is a new universal agreement on global emissions that can rein in climate impacts.
Right now, odds are long on a legally binding agreement to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, but modest optimism is growing in the wake of several notable takeaways from last week:
1. The unprecedented size of the popular protests. A majority of the American public has seen climate change as a real and serious issue since the late 1990s, but converting popular opinion into action has been a challenge eluding activists for a generation. The unprecedented turnout last week may demonstrate that an important turning point has been reached in mobilizing populist demand for action to avert catastrophic climate change.
2. China and the U.S. finally showing movement on cutting back emissions. Recent progress by the world’s two biggest emitters of carbon is giving other countries a reason to come back to the table. Thanks to leadership by states like California and new nationwide fuel efficiency standards and Environmental Protection Agency rules that reduce carbon pollution from power plants, the U.S. is on track to achieve 17 percent emissions reductions from 2005 levels by 2020 (a target set at the Copenhagen negotiations in 2009).
Meanwhile, China has made massive investments in renewable energy — particularly solar — and has shown greater interest in measures to limit emissions growth, committing to a ban on coal in Beijing by 2020 and even piloting cap-and-trade systems in several of its cities and provinces. National politics remain a major barrier to a nationwide agreement in both countries, but these gains are being taken as signals that the world’s largest economies are exploring ways they can be part of a lower-carbon future.
3. Indicators of a paradigm shift from thinking of climate response as a burden to seeing it as an opportunity. A group of seven nations has convened as the UN Global Commission on the Economy and Climate. The Better Growth Better Climate Report they’ve just released makes the strongest case yet that cutting emissions, rather than being incompatible with economic growth, can provide robust, quantifiable economic benefits. On the other side of the balance sheet, the philanthropist-funded Risky Business Project, launched in 2013, is working to assess and publicize the economic risks of not responding to climate change.
The economic case is now coming from the private sector as well. One of the most notable new signs at last week’s sessions was the number of leading businesses making visible pledges to embrace a low-carbon future. Several dozen leading multinational companies have committed to switching to a 100 percent renewable energy portfolio by 2020 — and will recruit 100 more top global companies to do so, as well. Interest from the private sector is aided not just by the increasing social and economic costs of carbon, but by new opportunities in the renewable energy market. Solar and wind energy have both come down dramatically in price in just the past few years (thanks in a large part to massive contracts from countries like China and Germany), making new economies of scale possible.
4. Cities taking the lead on climate response. The least surprising faces at Climate Week were probably those of the mayors of major cities, who — especially in the United States — have been leading the response to the climate crisis for the last decade. Cities have been ahead of the curve in taking steps to reduce emissions, prepare disaster response plans, share lessons and join forces to pressure state and national government for action. And, absent an effective agreement between nations after 2015, the following year will give cities their own opportunity with a summit focused specifically on the global urban agenda. Habitat III is the third in a series of once-in-a-generation international convenings focused specifically on urbanization and sustainability.
In the decade and a half since the last Habitat meeting, in Rio De Janeiro, global cities have decisively emerged as the dominant form of human settlement on the planet. The population of global cities is now at an all-time high of 3.5 billion and is expected to double again by 2050. Cities have led and will continue to lead meaningful action on reducing the climate impact of people on the planet.
Action to shrink emissions cannot come too soon. Thanks to years of equivocation, atmospheric CO2 continues to climb at a record-shattering pace. Without immediate, dramatic action, it now appears likely that the global temperature will soar past the 2 degrees Celsius threshold long held to be the point of no return for catastrophic climate change.
While, there was no bold international agreement coming out of last week’s Climate Summit, the flood of meaningful commitments from the public and private sectors and the groundswell of citizen pressure around the world are promising signs that global action need not wait. Cities, businesses and individuals can get started right now.