Workshop
Details
EKLA-KAS together with the International Institute for Sustainability (Rio de Janeiro) has completed, in November 2017, the project “NDCs: What is there for Latin America big cities?”. 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. It appeared appropriate to begin the exercise with a selected number of countries (Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Peru) and mega cities in Latin America (Rio de Janeiro, Mexico city, Buenos Aires and Lima), an indication that it was already envisaged the desirability of expanding the exercise to other countries in the Region.
In the last year, during the preparation of the “first phase”, we have observed continued worldwide interest and concern with the real capacity and commitment by developing country governments to honor their NDC pledges under the Paris Agreement. Beyond national governments, cities, in particular, have a crucial contribution in helping countries to arrive at a climate agreement of a global scale – and also for allowing countries to achieve their indicated mitigation targets.
In this context, and to complement the exercise carried out in the “first phase”, we are replicating it to other countries in Latin America (and their respective capital cities). While it would be most interesting to involve all remaining countries in the Region, we conducted a preliminary analysis which quickly 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. 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 think that there is a big window 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. Santiago de Chile can serve as a model for the other countries in terms of preparing its own adaptation plan and eventually coordinating it (or not) with the national government.
The workshop will take place on October 18, in Santiago de Chile, as official event of the Climate Week 2018.
More information regarding the agenda will be available soon.
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