UN
Climate Change
Global
Climate Action
1
April
2021 | |
High Level Climate Champions
Newsletter | |
The Resilience
Front-Runners | |
People and
communities around the world are already
building their own resilience to the impacts of
climate change. This work must be locally-led,
because it varies across communities and
geographies. But the solutions also need to be
scaled up to benefit the billions of people
already on the frontlines of the climate
crisis.
Efforts to
build resilience should also create the space
and opportunities for young people to share
their ideas, and provide the education and jobs
that allow them to get involved, said Labiba
Samad, from the Least Developed Countries
Universities Consortium on Climate Change.
“Climate resilience, adaptation, mitigation and
even disaster risk reduction needs to be
addressed everywhere, but there are no jobs or
roles for addressing this,” she
said.
The first 20
Race to
Resilience
partner initiatives, announced during the
event, aim to
support, develop and expand locally-led work.
The initiatives have a combined global reach of
over 1 billion people, and focus on issues
ranging from water stress to disaster warnings
to mangroves to insurance.
NbScale4Resilience, for
example, provides software that helps financial
institutions make more informed decisions for
financing smallholder farmers, and that informs
smallholder farmers about nature-based
solutions. It aims to make 100,000 smallholder
farmers more resilient in Ecuador, Senegal,
Guatemala, Benin and Rwanda. “We have to find
solutions at scale, while listening to local
voices,” said Sabrina Nagel during the
event.
Risk-informed Early Action
Partnership,
similarly, aims to have 1 billion people covered
by improved early warning systems, and to
increase investment in early warning systems
that deliver information coming from ‘last-mile’
communities. “The so-called last-mile should
actually be the first mile from the design stage
up to the implementation stage,” said Emma
Flaherty.
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Access to
clean water is a universal human right, because
it is fundamental to our health and
life.
Yet today,
2.2 billion still lack basic safely managed
drinking water service and 3 billion lack
hand-washing facilities, according to our
Climate
Action Pathway for water. The water sector’s
emissions account for 10 percent of global
greenhouse gases and are on track to outstrip
sustainable supply by 40 percent by 2030. This
will be driven by the growing demand for
evermore scarce supplies. On top of that, nine
out of 10 natural disasters - exacerbated by the
climate crisis - affect water, such as droughts
and floods.
That makes
the water
sector a crucial player in both the Race to
Zero and Race
to Resilience. The 50 largest water utilities
supply over 1 billion people. So the more they
emit, the more unstable their water supplies and
customers become. But the more they mitigate and
build resilience, the better and healthier the
future will be for all.
In a
zero-emissions future, freshwater resources will
be protected, restored and reused, along with
wastewater. Operations will be powered
entirely by renewable energy. Regenerative
agriculture will be a global norm. And half of
freshwater ecosystems and inland waters will be
sequestering CO2, reversing biodiversity loss
and supporting resilience and livelihoods for
nearby communities.
Change is
underway. Ten
water utilities have joined the Race to
Zero, including Chile’s Aguas Andinas, France’s
Suez and Australia’s Yara Valley Water. Four UK
water companies have published a sector-wide plan for reaching net-zero
carbon by 2030. To accelerate a system
breakthrough, we are challenging water and wastewater
utilities
responsible for 20 percent of the global supply
to join the race by COP26 and help drive full
decarbonization of their services in 20
countries by 2030.
In the Race
to Resilience, we welcomed the Water
Resilience Coalition as an inaugural partner
initiative. The coalition of 19 major businesses
has already raised its goals to deliver positive
action to 100 water-stressed basins (from 30),
and to ensure resilient water supplies and
sanitation services to 100 million people (from
30 million).
That is the
type of exponential ambition that will drive our
transformation to zero emissions and greater
resilience. | |
Host Your Own TEDx Countdown
Event | |
TED is
inviting communities around the world - schools,
universities, businesses, nonprofits, city
representative offices and more - to share their
own climate solutions by curating and hosting
TEDx Countdown events between 30 October and 31
December.
Countdown is a global initiative
powered by TED and Future
Stewards to
champion and accelerate solutions to the climate
crisis, turning ideas into action. TEDx
Countdown events are special gatherings to
amplify the moment and demonstrate local and
global climate solutions. The events can vary in
format – virtual gatherings with or without
original speakers, community brainstorms,
turn-key gatherings, showcases of climate
solution technologies, or even volunteer actions
contributing to positive change.
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- Taking stock of net
zero: Nearly two-thirds of countries, 13 percent
of cities with more than 500,000 people and at
least one-fifth of the 2,000 largest public
companies are now committed to reaching net zero
emissions, according to the first such
quantitative analysis by the Energy
and Climate Intelligence Unit and Oxford Net
Zero. However,
the quality of these commitments varies hugely,
with only 20 percent of targets meeting the Race
to Zero’s minimum criteria.
- Vision 2050: To reach
zero emissions by 2050, business leaders will
need to reinvent capitalism to reward true value
creation, focus on building long-term
resilience, and move beyond the principle of
do-no-harm to regeneration, according to the
World
Business Council for Sustainable
Development.
The report sets out nine transformation pathways
covering essential business activities such as
energy, transport, products and material,
financial products and services, health and
wellbeing, and water and
sanitation.
- Future public transport:
Green investments in public transport systems
will create 4.6 million additional jobs by 2030
across 100 cities, and protect tens of millions
of workers in lower income and service sector
jobs, according to research
from C40. The
investments would cut air pollution in some
cities by up to 45 percent - reducing health
impacts - and cut greenhouse gas emissions by
more than half by 2030.
- Urban opportunities:
Cities in China, India, Indonesia, Brazil,
Mexico and South Africa could help cut annual
emissions by an extra 87-96 percent by 2050 if
they adopt existing solutions such as
retrofitting buildings and transforming urban
mobility, the Coalition for Urban
Transitions
found. Creating more compact and better
connected cities helps reduce urban poverty and
inequality at the same time.
- Renewable cities in
2021: One billion people, or a quarter of the
world’s urban population, live in a city with a
renewable energy target and/or policy - a sign
that city leaders are increasingly using
renewables to help fight energy poverty, tackle
air pollution and climate change, and improve
public health and wellbeing, according to
REN21. Over 800 cities are
now committed to net zero emissions - an
eight-fold increase from 2019.
- The energy pathway to
1.5°C: Proven technologies for transitioning to
a net-zero energy system largely already exist,
according to the International Renewable Energy
Agency.
Renewable power, green hydrogen and modern
energy will dominate energy supplies in that
future, along with energy efficiency and greater
use of power in buildings, industry and
transport.
- Climate Action 100+
benchmark: While corporate climate ambition is
growing, investor group Climate
Action 100+
has found that companies still have a long way
to go. None of the companies assessed in its
first benchmark performed at a high level across
the nine key indicators and metrics. None had
fully disclosed how they intend to achieve their
goals for net zero emissions by 2050,
either.
- Latin America and
Caribbean Regional Climate Week 2021: The
organizing partners are accepting expressions of
interest in joining the Virtual Thematic
Sessions for Regional Climate Week, on 11-14 May
and hosted by the Dominican Republic. Regional
Climate Weeks are an opportunity for national
and subnational governments, indigenous
communities, the private sector and civil
society to shape the implementation and delivery
of national Paris climate plans. Expressions of interest are due by
7 April.
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