Global Green News
Bill Clinton to cities: Act on climate
CNN.com. May 20, 2009. By Dean Irvine
SEOUL, South Korea (CNN) -- Former U.S. President Bill Clinton on Tuesday urged urban leaders and policymakers they need to take the lead now in fighting climate change.
"What are you going to do and how much are you going to spend?" Clinton asked leaders from the world's biggest cities at a climate summit being held in South Korea's capital, Seoul.
Officials from the world's 40 biggest cities plus 17 affiliate municipalities are attending the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit, which ends on Thursday.
Waiting for nations to take the lead with a new climate protocol in Copenhagen in December is not an option, said David Miller, mayor of Toronto and chairman of the C40 Cities Leadership Group.
"If governments talk about reducing CO2 (carbon dioxide), cities are the ones that show how it's done," Miller said. "The point is that cities act, and working together we have a scale and a size that we dramatically increase people's ability to fight climate change.
"The challenge for national governments is that while they can sometimes reach agreement they don't know how to act collectively," Miller continued. "For cities, that's easier. We all have climate strategies, but can make our actions work better and make the partnerships to do that."
The Seoul summit is the third conference by cities held to discuss responses to climate change. The C40 group was established in London in 2005. A second summit was held in New York in 2007.
Much of the talk at this week's conference was how major urban centers could work toward adhering to the Kyoto Protocol, the existing environmental treaty that sets targets for nations to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations. Adopted in December 1997, the Kyoto Protocol entered into force in February 2005.
In countries that did not sign up to the Kyoto agreement, cities took it upon themselves to reduce their carbon footprint. While the United States did not sign Kyoto, 825 U.S. cities and towns signed up to a climate protection agreement that embraced that protocol's goals.
