The mayors of the world's biggest cities convened in Sao Paolo recently to team up against climate change and sea level rise. Neal Peirce sees much promise in the effort.
As Peirce reports, the organizers behind the international compact are aiming to become the world's leading and most effective environmental organization.
"But the object isn't to expand C40 membership indefinitely, said Rohit Aggarwalla, the first director of Bloomberg's "PlaNYC" sustainable investment effort and now a leading figure in launching the new C40. Rather, he said, the new goal is to include each new world "megacity" of 10 million or more inhabitants that appears on the world stage, and in addition to include the globe's top 25 metros in GDP - places that "punch above their weight economically."
In a second major move at São Paulo, the World Bank's president, Robert Zoellick, was on hand to announce his institution was terminating its historic practice of dealing exclusively with national governments. Now, he said, there will be "one-window access" for cities to tap the bank's climate-related expertise, based on a new C40-bank agreement. Zoellick said the bank's climate investment funds - which totaled $6.4 billion last year - might now enable cities to attract as much as $50 billion in private capital for their climate projects."
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