Tag: C40 Voices

Climate change isn’t fair. The people responsible for the least greenhouse gas emissions, who have benefited least from our fossil fuel addicted societies, will suffer the most from its climate consequences. The poorest and most vulnerable in our societies are disproportionately at risk from rising seas and climate related disasters. Women and children suffer more than men. Perhaps most unfair of all, it is future generations who will live with the long-term consequences of climate change.

A new C40 toolkit is now available to help cities improve the quality of community wide greenhouse gas (GHG) emission accounting and reporting. It aims to guide practitioners through the process of assessing whether their emission inventories have followed the requirements and principles of the Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories (GPC), a best practice standard used by cities across the globe to measure and report GHG emissions in a comprehensive and consistent manner. 

The mission of C40 is to spot world-leading best practice in climate action by individual cities and use it to inspire others. Many of these best practices begin as ideas in a city’s climate action plan, and Oslo's Climate and Energy Strategy is one of most impressive examples in the world, says C40 Executive Director Mark Watts. 

‘Liveable Streets’ is a seminal 1981 work by the urban designer and theorist Donald Appleyard that compared the experiences of people living on three similar streets in San Francisco. The main variable between the streets was different levels of car traffic: one with 2,000 vehicles per day, one with 8,700 vehicles per day and a third with 15,750 vehicles per day. Appleyard’s key finding was that residents of the high traffic streets were less likely to know their neighbours and more likely to feel lonely and isolated from their community. The evidence of the negative physical, mental and social effects caused by living near busy roads has only grown in the subsequent years. By Mark Watts, C40 Executive Director

The C40 Building Energy 2020 (BE2020) Programme will help more than 50 global cities take action to address a significant source of urban emissions and pollution. Read more in this article from Mark Watts, Executive Director of C40; Sonia Medina, Executive Director of Climate Change, Children’s Investment Fund Foundation; and Dan Hamza-Goodacre, Director Buildings and Industry, ClimateWorks Foundation.