On the frontlines of climate change and fitness inequalities, city leaders are participating in responses and learning from others how to address those challenges.
In July, the world experienced the day on record, and towns and cities around the world mobilized to keep their people safe. While a record singles day is due to many factors, including the weather update and Pacific El Niño, it reflects the same really demanding situations cities face. Lately, heat kills more people than any other weather-related hazard. It also has a negative effect on labour productivity and inflicts economic losses on staff whose physical condition and operating conditions are affected by excessive heat.
Over the past decade, an developing framework of studies on spatial justice (whether other communities have equitable access to resources and infrastructure that improve quality of life) has highlighted how differences between city neighborhoods have effects on all types of life outcomes. Paints is important. Determine if your days and nights are getting warmer and what protective factors, such as available green spaces and treetops, you have access to when the temperature rises. And it’s no coincidence that I live in those communities; This is the result of structural racism and economic forces such as gentrification and displacement that push those with fewer resources to places with less social and physical infrastructure to promote better health. In addition, children, the elderly, casual citizens and other marginalized communities are more vulnerable to the effects of excessive heat than others.
While the headlines may be intimidating, the smart news is that many city leaders perceive those issues and are employing economic development, climate policy, fitness policy, transportation and infrastructure for fitness, fighting climate change, and promoting socioeconomic justice in their communities. . For example, in 2021, several cities, in addition to Athens, Miami, and Dhaka, appointed their first “Director of Heat,” a position created to respond directly to the severity and scale of climate challenges.
Mayors and municipal governments are increasingly seen as “actors” than “retards” because they are on the front lines of the climate crisis. This is partly because leaders are closer to the network and there is built-in accountability at the local level; Inaction can lead to elimination. And at a time when many are calling for more ambitious and rapid global climate action, perhaps we can find solace in looking a little closer to home in our cities for results.
In short, as the climate changes, cities are prime places for experimentation and city leaders turn to ideas, lessons and inspiration.
The fact that cities deserve not to go it alone has made the COVID-19 pandemic evident. In C40 Cities, a global network of some 100 megacities in a project to combat climate change, the pandemic has revealed the power of collective action and platforms that facilitate immediate shared learning. The mayors of the C40 Cities network pivoted, and with renewed urgency, those city leaders collaborated on everything from securing and making public transport available to supporting and motivating critical staff (especially casual staff and merchants) and implementing coordinated approaches. state-of-the-art food distribution. Once again, we were reminded that cities are well equipped to learn, cooperate and collaborate in the face of major global challenges.
The same goes for weather action. For example, despite the anti-environmental timeline of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, some of the country’s largest cities, in addition to São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Curitiba, have come together to expand ambitious climate action. plans in line with the Paris Agreement, and those plans are already underway. Rafael Greca, the mayor of Curitiba, officially unveiled the city’s solar pyramid earlier this year, the first solar power plant to be built on a former landfill in Latin America, along with investments in solar panels on the city’s buildings. Curitiba gained critical insight into how it is most productive to make the project’s successes bigger, with around 2600 public buildings across the city considered as suitable locations for a similar mobile solar photovoltaic (PV) project. Sun Pyramid’s carbon rebates will be equivalent to taking more than 20,000 cars off the road for a year, as well as more than $500,000 in annual savings.
The key to the good fortune of any similar allocation is close collaboration between other government departments from the inception of the allocation, adopting a holistic technique with internal and external stakeholders, identifying applicable environmental and fiscal laws, land rights, and locating strong monetary partners to secure funding.
The effects go far beyond Curitiba. Other municipalities have benefited from the Solar Pyramid project. Last July, Rio de Janeiro signed a public-private partnership with the Rio Solar Consortium to launch the Carioca Solarium project. Over the next 12 months, a former landfill dump in Santa Cruz, west of the city, will be stocked with 11,000 panels, providing blank power to forty-five schools and 15 emergency care units, and generating at least part of a million dollars in annual energy savings. The style has spread to Mumbai, Cape Town, Dakar, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur.
What we see in Brazil is just one example of a bunch of examples of global coordination and learning. Putting myself in the place of those collaborations and exchanges is key. In my role at C40 and working with other city networks, I sit at the intersection of many of those people-to-people collaborations and have looked at three classes that can help city leaders drive learning and take action.
Architect Salvador Rueda first proposed the concept of superblocks in 1987, and in Barcelona’s Urban Mobility Plan 2013-2018, the city brought “superillas,” also known as superblocks. This government-funded allocation created an island of walkable, green and quiet spaces and returned the streets to other people (without claiming more land) by necessarily converting several small blocks into a larger block. They were once car-centric streets in public spaces for socializing, walking, and biking.
Cities looking to launch similar projects face setbacks rooted in considerations about how they will affect small businesses or the potential gentrification of neighborhoods. The lesson from Barcelona is that by focusing on spatial justice and deep network engagement, city councils can prioritize income neighborhoods to actively address inequalities in fitness or access to green spaces. After several successful pilot projects and careful research into the effects of the project after its launch, Barcelona plans to install 503 superblocks across the city by 2030. And today, more than 250 cities, in addition to Berlin, Bogotá and Los Angeles, have set out to learn more about how superblocks work. They have for radical transformation.
Without conscious intent, climate action can exacerbate inequality as much as climate inaction. Advancing equity requires intentional work. Power systems or energy modernization are vital moves to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, meet energy demands and adapt to excessive temperature changes. to high-income communities. Without focusing on equity, such projects can widen the existing inequality gap, especially given the existing cost-of-living crisis and its effect on low-income communities, communities of color, casual residents, and other marginalized groups.
In 2020, Joy Belmonte, the mayor of Quezon City in the Philippines, led the city to restructure departments guilty of climate change, but she didn’t stop it there; she made sure that equity was at the center of this work. She created a new logo unit tasked with incorporating equity and inclusion into climate action. This sweeping reform aims to ensure that allocations that are planned and implemented take climate outcomes and inequities into account. One of the tactics that the people achieve is through deep and meaningful engagement and consultation with the network and especially with the most difficult-to-succeed groups. Beyond institutional reform, Quezon City carries out tasks that are concerned with planetary well-being and focus on equity. For example, the city secured investment and is sunning its schools to provide clean, affordable, and reliable power to communities. The task will help the city reduce energy costs for 50 schools by eliminating the costly input of electricity from the grid. The cash stored can be used for training materials, better services or professional education for teachers. The force of the clean sun will also decrease air pollutants in the city, leading to better fitness outcomes for all communities.
Leaders will have to look for poor fitness equity outcomes in communities when implementing climate solutions. without electritown), so they suffer proportionately more fitness problems. City leaders who start out researching problems and learn about problems similar to systemic fitness inequalities in their cities, while taking action for the urban climate, are opening up a world of new artistic solutions.
For example, in Cape Town, the humid, bloodless climate can make its population vulnerable to tuberculosis and other diseases, especially in low-income neighborhoods where housing lacks good enough insulation. The city learned that by improving the roofs of low-income communities, it can only improve the fitness of communities and the energy power of buildings. The results of the pilot allocation showed significant improvements in the fitness and happiness of citizens who gained a new remote roof, while stress levels were related to the financial burden of power and fitness care. Prices were also reduced. Following the good fortune of the pilot allocation, the city plans to expand the program to 40,000 households, with allocated emission discounts of up to 28,000 tons of CO2 consistent with the year.
These examples give an idea of the scope and scope of the influence that mayors and local governments have on the link between climate, fitness and equity. informed and percentage-rated responses and create platforms that foster a healthy dose of festival among global cities to develop the ambition, scale and speed of climate action. These urban connections provide unprecedented access to the wisdom and resources of peers, with globalized and urban world benefits, international relations are bearing fruit.
When we take a look at how the world has faced the climate crisis, it will be a story of connecting communities, peoples and countries. Just as we want global leaders to collaborate with each other, we also want mayors, heads of transportation services, heads of other agencies within municipal governments, and village citizens to paint together. When those connections continue to grow and learning spreads, we will see climate action on an unprecedented scale and in a longer term where everyone, everywhere can thrive.
Read more through Mehrnaz Ghojeh.
Mehrnaz Ghojeh trained as an architect and is a specialist in urban development. He leads a global timeline focused on financing and implementing a just transition within C40 Cities, a global network of mayors from the world’s major cities, united in action to tackle the climate crisis and inequality.
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