Tag: Deadline 2020

Cities, businesses and citizens are today looking to the most comprehensive roadmap on how they can deliver their part of the Paris Agreement and tackle climate change.

By Mark Watts, Executive Director of C40

The launch of Mission 2020 should be welcomed by everyone who understands why tackling climate change is humanity’s most urgent task. Its focus is getting us over the first hurdle in the race to exit the Fossil Fuel Age and move into a greener, cleaner, climate-safe era for humanity. C40, which launched its own ‘Deadline 2020’ program a few months ago, will certainly be getting right behind Mission 2020.

The primary purpose of any government is to protect its citizens. Climate change poses a unique and growing threat to the lives, health and jobs of people in every city, state and around the world. The policies and budget priorities announced by President Trump in recent weeks threaten to undermine America’s global leadership on tackling climate change. If enacted this will be bad for the United States and bad for the planet.

It is now clearer than ever that cities must play a critical role in delivering the ambition of the Paris Agreement and prevent devastating impacts of climate change.

A post from C40 Executive Director Mark Watts

Early in the new year the Guardian newspaper asked some of the world’s most prominent scientists if it was still possible to prevent catastrophic climate change. The bleak assessment from all but one respondent was that it is not. One called it “on the fanciful edge of implausible”. This not only made for depressing reading, but also provided a marked contrast to the sense of determined optimism that pervaded C40’s mayoral summit a few weeks earlier. Gathered in Mexico City, mayors of the Steering Committee – C40’s elected leadership – voted unanimously to adopt a target of constraining global temperature rise to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average (the toughest goal of the Paris Climate Agreement), and to make it a condition of C40 membership that all cities have a plan to deliver their proportionate contribution towards this goal.