Photo: IMG_3382
Mayor of Rio says city leaders primed to deliver COP21 goals
16 November 2016
by Jonathan Andrews
The Mayor of Rio Eduardo Paes said business and urban leaders together could lead international efforts to de-carbonise and increase climate resilience through public-private partnerships during a keynote speech in Marrakesh on 14 November 2016.
Speaking at the Sustainable Innovation Forum for the COP22 climate change conference to an audience of NGOs, government agencies, large corporates and small business owners, Paes called for mayors “with the powers to act in sectors that generate more emissions” to do more to reverse the effects of global warming in urban areas.
“Our work has started, but we are late,” he said.
Rio aims to be a carbon-neutral city by 2065, a target Paes said the city has “begun planning for the long run”, developing the first resilience plan in Latin America by partnering with the Rockefeller Foundation, C40 Cities and Bloomberg Associates.
The mayor offered the 2016 Rio Olympics as an example of how city partnerships with private sector companies could enable clean energy projects to grow, adding that 70 percent of the venues opened during the games had been funded by the private sector. He added that the benefits of the investment captured during the Olympics reached basic improvements in infrastructure, including the creation of clean transportation networks.
“Now, many Cariocas, as we are known, have access to the best transport alternatives. With the [bus rapid transit] BRT system, we cut by half the commuting time of the underprivileged.”
The mayor however acknowledged that several decades of inaction over climate change appear to have ”weakened” the impact of the COP21 Paris agreement, which came into force on 4 November 2016.
He citied UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report for 2016, which shows that full implementation of the COP21 would struggle to stop global temperatures rising by as much as 3 degrees Celsius.
Paes’s closing comments turned towards the result of the US election, which will see Donald Trump, a climate-sceptic, enter the Oval Office in January 2017, saying he felt confident the COP21 agreement “will continue independently of changes in government”.
