Читать книгу The Climate City - Группа авторов - Страница 21

Cities have been hives of ambition since they were first created. Birthed by the ambitious, they have attracted like minds in search of their fortune, of significance, of life’s meaning, and much more. Today, we need these hives of ambition to assume leadership of the just transition to a sustainable world.

Thomas Berry, in The Great Work, describes these decisive decades in the context of a long multicentury arc as one when we have to work out how to become a benign force on the planet – with ourselves as fellow humans and with all creation. This is, in essence, the “Great Work” that lies before us. And as faith in national governments and global institutions falters, it is in the city level of democracy and leadership that we locate a stable point of leadership to embrace this level of responsibility.

Reaching the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement will require ambitious actions from all sectors and levels of our society, but especially in our cities. More than 55% of people already live in urban areas, and this is forecast to rise to 68% by mid-century.¹ Urban areas account for more than 60–70% of the world’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, consuming 66–78% of the world’s energy, while occupying less than 2% of the land.² Even as we decouple economic growth from emissions – already achieved by over twenty countries before – the sheer scale of the amount of people living in cities means that climate leadership by cities requires ambition and talent at city-scale as much as ever before in history.

But ambition on its own will not be enough. A mayor will always fall short when simply citing “a net-zero city” as a strategic goal. It may sound good, but without clarity in describing that destination it may even come to be seen as just a PR stunt that sounds good but lacks substance (Figure 1.3). At the other extreme, a crystal-clear set of cautious environmental objectives is simply not going to be bold enough in this time of climate emergency. So, how do we retain the ambition but increase the clarity on what cities can and should be aiming for to lead on climate?

Figure 1.3 The need for both ambition and clarity will drive success. (Source: Boyd, P. and Pickett, C., 2020. Climate Ambition: A Case for Net-Zero Clarity. Yale Center for Business and the Environment. https://cbey.yale.edu/research/defining-net-zero.)

As I’ve argued with co-author Casey R. Pickett in a recent paper³ – from which this paper draws – we need a consistent definition of “Net-Zero” that cities (and organizations, companies, and countries) can use and measure progress against. If we are to maximize the probability of a just transition to a sustainable society, all actors have to explain what they mean by “net-zero” in addition to their intended deadlines and paths. We suggest four measurable criteria for any undertaking of “net-zero” to be worthy of capitalizing to “Net-Zero”.