More than half of the world’s population now live in cities according to the UN, and by mid-century, this figure is projected to reach 68%. Cities are already accountable for 60% of global greenhouse gas emissions and as urban populations grow, their impact on the climate will intensify.
In the global fight against climate change, local governments are key to implementing innovative solutions to lower emissions and create sustainable, liveable cities. This was an important message from the “Exponential Race to the Top” session organised by the Exponential Roadmap Initiative, in collaboration with Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI) at the UNFCCC climate change conference (SB60) held in June in Bonn, Germany.
Mohamed Sefiani, the Mayor of Chefchaouen, Morocco; Carolina Urrutia Vásquez, former Environment Secretary of Bogotá, Colombia; Yunus Arikan, Head of Global Policy and Advocacy at ICLEI; and Ziaul Haque, Director General of the Ministry of Environment, Forest & Climate Change in Bangladesh discussed how their city, country or region is seizing opportunities to win the new economy through green growth.
Green transformation plans in cities
Cities are pivotal in the quest to decarbonise buildings, energy, transport and waste. Often, it is these local entities that set the pace for national climate targets. Mohamed Sefiani, the Mayor of Chefchaouen, Morocco, underscored the unique position of cities that are neither big nor small, which facilitates a participatory approach to urban planning and local economic development.
Chefchaouen is painted in blue and committed to green. It’s an intermediary city and this is an advantage for us. We have human scale and proximity; proximity with people, with civil society, with the local actors and that’s helped us to have one participatory approach which supports our initiative and our programmes and our vision.
Chefchaouen’s Vision 2030, which outlines how the city plans to localise and implement the Sustainable Development Goals, integrates climate mitigation and adaptation, steering clear of the pitfalls encountered by larger cities.
We launched [Vision 2030] in 2018 and we are working on it. And the participatory approach is easier in an intermediary city, such as Chefchaouen. Local economic development is very important for us because we know that intermediary cities have a strong relationship between the city and the rural areas. So, we are working in this economy, in solidarity and with the social economy.
Urban planning is important for us because we have to think about climate mitigation and adaptation, and the scale of the city will help us to avoid the mistakes done in larger cities in the world and in Morocco. Climate and sustainability are very important. We share best practices, we share new ideas in Africa and around the world, and all of that helps us to grow correctly and to respect our values of climate and sustainability.
Local ambitions often act as catalysts for national progress, Mr Sefiani said, illustrating Chefchaouen’s success in securing financing for green projects.
Less than 10% of climate finance goes to the local, but we can be innovative. We can work with the multilevel action. With the support of the national government and the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region of France, we launched an energy information centre, the first one in Morocco, to advise and to support all studies and companies to use renewable energy and energy efficiency.
We also had an agreement with the capital development fund, the UNCDF, and the Moroccan national government to support us in a 100% sustainable and smart public lighting network. It will be the first city in Morocco to have 100 per cent LED, sustainable and smart public lighting in the city. We now have 50 per cent of the municipal buildings equipped with solar energy.
It’s very important to be supported by networks, such as ICLEI and to have multilevel climate action and multilevel sustainability action with the region, with the national government and with international organisations.
Carolina Urrutia Vásquez, former Environment Secretary of Bogotá, Colombia’s capital city with a population of more than 8 million, said one of the challenges of larger cities was rapid growth and lack of organisation.
We grew in quite a disorganised manner and city planning is relatively new in action, despite the fact that it’s been part of the legal framework for years. And it’s a huge challenge to go correcting the mistakes that were made in the past – that we didn’t know were mistakes because we didn’t know we were going to be facing a climate crisis of this magnitude.
The city has transitioned to better-quality fuels, explained Ms Vásquez, and implemented one of the world’s largest rapid bus systems, including introducing electric buses.
Bogotá is a huge city. Most of the people in Bogotá spend upwards of an hour and a half on public transport every day. Initially, our public transport system wasn’t centrally planned and had a lot of issues with air quality.
So, beginning in the early 90s, a huge reform agenda started to happen with our transport system, beginning with changing our fuels. The fuel quality in Bogotá was really quite bad and so arrangements were made between the national government and our gasoline producers to bring better quality gasoline and diesel to the city. That had a huge change in our air quality, but also had good results in our climate change and GHG emissions in general.
Bogotá had the first really big rapid bus system in Latin America and I think in the world. We’re slowly going into electric buses. We’re in a competition with Santiago de Chile to be one of the cities, outside of China, with the most electric buses. There are now almost 1,300 electric buses circulating in Bogotá.
These reforms have amounted to about an 80% reduction of our particulate matter from the public transport system. This is a life-changing improvement for many people in Bogotá, particularly women and children who tend to be the ones who get sicker from air quality issues and who have to stay home to take care of their children. We have a long way to go, but Bogotá has managed to reduce about 18 per cent of its emissions from 2017 to 2023, based mostly on these changes to our transport.
Ms Vásquez also said that planning played a key role in reducing emissions and making cities more liveable.
Despite the fact that we didn’t get to build a city of proximity, we’re trying to build smaller cities inside our big city. We’re too big to be a 15-minute city, but we can be a 30-minute city. So, what we did was plan for a city that has access to economic opportunities, to transport, health, education, everything that’s vital for our citizenry in 30 minutes.
It’s important that we start thinking of the city, especially cities as large as Bogotá, not just as a whole, but of smaller communities inside the city that can build on proximity, quality of life, better transport, and, of course, green areas.
It’s a little more costly, and it takes more time. You have to talk to the people. You have to think about renovation in terms of participation and what people actually want, because they’re already living there. But we’re sure that it makes for a better quality of life, for less pollution, and for a better scenario, both in terms of mitigation and adaptation to climate change.
Yunus Arikan, Global Advocacy Director at ICLEI, explained how national and local plans can synergise, showcasing examples from cities in Germany, Canada and Japan.
The city of Bonn is one of the champions of climate-neutral cities to be climate-neutral by 2035. This is 10 years before the federal target of Germany. It was revised in the past couple of years, because the city administration created a network with citizens, so that the contributions of the communities and neighbourhoods are then taken up in collaboration with the administration. So that it’s not a top-down from the city hall, but a collective effort. Mobility plans are also an issue in Europe. The city is trying to use more non-motorized transport or installing solar power more rapidly than before.
Vancouver is another example. They are using the waste heat from the wastewater system for district heating of buildings and 10 years ago they introduced the zero emission standards for buildings.
Tokyo is one of the most urbanised and full of high-rise buildings. For the past 12 years, Tokyo has been implementing an urban cap-and-trade system with the residential and commercial buildings.
Launched in 2010, Tokyo’s urban cap-and-trade programme requires building owners to meet allotted CO2 reduction targets through on-site energy efficiency measures or an emission trading scheme.
Serious emission reduction policies come from these communities, from commercial activities and citizens on board. This shows that whether it’s in the Global North or the Global South, as long as you have a passionate leader, you have good skilled staff, and if you have citizen engagement, then progressive policies can be implemented everywhere and we can make changes in the lives of our neighbours.
Aligning national climate action plans with local initiatives
Ziaul Haque, from Bangladesh’s Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Climate Change, highlighted the necessity of aligning national climate action plans with local initiatives.
In terms of vulnerability, we are facing catastrophic impacts from climate change. [Bangladesh] is losing almost 6.8 per cent of our GDP each year and if we go with this business-as-usual approach, then it will increase the loss of GDP in the years to come.
The country also has a lot of potential in terms of tapping renewable energy resources, Mr Haque said.
We submitted our Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) update in 2021, where we tried to include the renewable energy contribution to a greater extent. Now we are actually in the process of developing our 2025 NDC and focusing on the city-level climate action plan,” he said. “Our big cities have developed a comprehensive, ambitious climate action plan for 2030, 2040 and 2050. So this time, while developing our national NDC by 2025, we will assess and reflect the aspiration of city governments to our national mitigation targets and hopefully, there will be a great deal of improvement in terms of utilising the renewable energy in our NDC submission.
Bangladesh is set to graduate from the UN designation of Least Developed Country in 2026, Mr Haque notes, and hopes to attract investments for clean technologies and renewables.
We call it the Mujib Climate Prospective Plan for 2041. We’ll reach our 100 years of independence in 2041, so we developed a trajectory where we’ll try to achieve from vulnerability to resilience to prosperity. We put forward visionary targets in terms of renewable energy. So by 2030, we’ll improve our contribution, the relative contribution of our renewable sources, from now 6 per cent to 30 per cent. By 2041, we aspire to have 40 per cent of renewable sources in our national electricity generation. At the same time, we have also developed a climate and disaster risk instrument, where we will try to put some innovative financing mechanisms to integrate in our national policies.
Cities, regions and countries play an essential role in driving climate solutions. From Morocco’s solar energy information centre to Bogotá’s electric buses, Japan’s urban cap-and-trade programme to Vancouver’s waste-water heating system, and to Bangladesh’s ambitious renewable energy targets – collective efforts and shared knowledge are paving the way to a sustainable future.
Watch the session (30 minutes):
