NDCs: What is there for Latin American Big Cities?

To follow up 2017 activities on the topic, EKLA-KAS together with the International Institute for Sustainability (Rio de Janeiro) organized a workshop on October 18, 2018 in Santiago de Chile, as official event of the Climate Week 2018.

The key objective was to help both national governments as well as selected city governments in Latin America to strengthen a dialogue process to align the national NDC with existing city government plans and initiatives on climate change, which may have synergies with each other. A preliminary analysis indicated that only a very limited number of countries have both an NDC with clear targets as well as a capital city with its own climate plan with mitigation targets – which is a basic requirement to replicate the exercise already conducted in 2017. These countries are Colombia, Uruguay and Ecuador. In Central America, Honduras (and Tegucigalpa) also have sufficiently developed NDC targets and city level mitigation plans. Surprisingly, the city of Santiago de Chile has an adaptation plan, but not a mitigation one.

While the mitigation agenda is more present among the richer and more developed countries, the adaptation agenda is, on the other hand, of greater interest to the poorer and smaller countries, as they are known to be particularly vulnerable to extreme climate events. This does not mean that these countries have a national or city level adaptation plan, but most of them mention adaptation as an issue of greater priority than mitigation. The level of awareness and interest also does not ensure a good level of coordination between national governments and respective city and municipal governments. We thus thought that there was a big window of opportunity here: in a similar way that we did for the mitigation agenda in the larger/richer countries, we could help the smaller countries and their respective capital cities to coordinate actions on the adaptation agenda. Myrna Campoleoni (Uruguay), Andrea De Nigris (Montevideo), Sergio Palacios (Honduras) and Cinthia Borjas (Tegucigalpa) presented their mitigation cases of study, and Laura Mora (Costa Rica), Jonatan Arias (San José), Silvia Zúñiga de Ordóñez (Guatemala), Rossana García (Guatemala City), Mirta E. Benítez (Panama), Enrique Vargas (Panama City), Nico Kohlhas (Chile) and Jordan Harris (Santiago) presented on adaptation.

The study with the results is available for free download.