PLEA Network

14 September 2018, Climate Home News, ‘Major shift’: Nations face bottom-up pressure to act on climate change. Cities, states and business from around the world will call on national governments to redouble their efforts to fight climate change, as a summit in San Francisco ends on Friday. The ‘call to action’ will ask nations to update their pledges to the Paris Agreement at a meeting hosted by UN secretary general Antonio Guterres in one year’s time in New York, according to organisers of the Global Climate Action Summit. Currently, the collective pledges under the Paris Agreement set the world on course for a disastrous level of warming. The emergence of ‘subnational’ actors in the fight against climate change comes as UN talks between countries are mired in technical struggles over the rules of the Paris Agreement they signed in 2015. WWF’s Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, a former Peruvian minister who was on the summit’s advisory committee, said national governments would have “the wind at their backs” and be able to strike a deal on the rules when they meet in Poland in December. If the rules for the deal can be agreed, then attention turns to how fast countries are using it to cut emissions. Deeper cuts to greenhouse pollution “really rest on the generation of political will from the ground up”, Elliot Diringer, executive vice president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, told Climate Home News. Mayors and city officials CHN spoke to said they felt pressure to act on climate change because they were in direct contact with its effect on people. Milanese mayor Giuseppe Sala said the commitments made at his level of government could drive action higher up. “If we do something good in a city then the government can be pushed to copy that,” he said. “If I fly back to Milan and I tell the journalists and people I want to do this and that because I agreed with the other mayors of main cities of the world, I will be stronger.” The gathering this week, which was organised by California governor Jerry Brown, saw a host of announcements coming from what participants dubbed the ‘real economy’. Those included: Read more here