GoodGeist
A podcast on sustainability, hosted by Damla Özlüer and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network. Looking at sustainability issues, communications, and featuring global guests from a wide variety of sectors such as business, NGOs and government.
GoodGeist
Cities United in Climate Action, with Mark Watts
What would it take to turn our cities into champions of climate action? We talk to Mark Watts, the Executive Director of C40 Cities, to uncover his remarkable journey from advising the Mayor of London on climate issues to leading a global network of over 100 cities committed to cutting emissions by half by 2030.
Mark takes us through the role of cities in combating the climate crisis, how urban areas are uniquely positioned to drive significant change. He dives into the transformative policies that are reshaping urban landscapes, from New York, to Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Sao Paulo and Milan. This episode is packed with insights and inspiration for anyone interested in the future of urban sustainability.
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Good Geist, a podcast series on sustainability hosted by Damla Özler and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network.
Speaker 2:Hello, hello everyone, you are listening to Good Guys, the message on sustainability which is brought to you by the DNS Network, the global network of agencies dedicated to making the world a better place. This is Damla from Mira Agency, istanbul, and.
Speaker 3:This is Steve from Creative Concern in Manchester, so this podcast series explores global sustainability issues, how they're communicated and what creativity can do to make positive change happen.
Speaker 2:So in this episode we're going to talk to Mark Watts, executive Director of C40 Cities. C40 is the powerful group of global cities leading on climate action and under Mark's leadership it has grown to a team of 300 people supporting 100 of the world's most leading cities.
Speaker 3:So bear with us, mark. There's more bio to come before we start talking. So you made it onto Time magazine's Time 100 climate list. That's very cool. Named a defender, and before that you were a director at arab and you're a great lover of music. I've also heard that you've been found pulling pints at glastonbury.
Speaker 4:So, mark, it is absolutely awesome for you taking time to talk to dameron myself it is wonderful to be joining you and and uh, that was all true, except for C4 has grown since we wrote that blurb, I would say because we're now over 400 staff. But it's nice to have positive growth in the environmental world, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Brilliant to have you with us, Mark, and a brilliant bio, especially with the music part, I think. So we always love to find out how people came to be doing what they are doing. Always love to find out how people came to be doing what they are doing. What's been your journey and what led you to dedicate your career to tackling the climate emergency?
Speaker 4:well, the truth on the climate bit is I was instructed to. So I was working for a very kind of far-sighted political leader, ken livingston um, as an advisor to him when he was mayor of London and I mean to be fair, I was already working on transport things, sustainable transport and air quality. But he used to used to occasionally give me books to read at the weekend which then I was supposed to summarize for him, and one of them was Jared Diamond's collapse, the sort of history of how civilizations, human civilizations, have survived or collapsed throughout history. And his premise was often that was on the basis of not being able to live within environmental boundaries. And I remember coming back in with my little summary saying this is fascinating and this climate change thing seems really scary. And Ken said that's good, you're now my climate advisor. And from there I had to go away and learn.
Speaker 3:Wow, yeah, jared Diamond's Collapse. It's on my bookshelf out in the office, mark, so it's a starting point for many of us, and I actually even remember you having some time here in lovely Manchester as part of all of that journey as well, which is amazing. So my question to you, mark, is many will have heard of C40, but not really know how it works. So could you give us a snapshot of how C40 has grown, where it came from and how it's such a powerful global network now?
Speaker 4:Yeah, we're kind of a combination. We're a membership organization, so a combination of being a membership organization. It's just under 100 of the world's largest, most influential cities spread right across the world. So Beijing, tokyo, new York, rio, london, paris, etc. You don't pay an entry fee to be part of C40. It's an invitation from the other members that they think that mayor or that city is really leading on climate and environment. And to stay a member you have to meet leadership standards that are largely based off halving emissions by 2030, the Paris Agreement, science-based climate targets, but they're also about being an active participant.
Speaker 4:So it's a very vibrant network where you have to bring something, you have to offer things that other cities can learn from, as well as learning yourselves.
Speaker 4:But as we've grown over the years coming up to 20 years, 20 years next year, c40 has been going um, we're also effectively a kind of a think tank, a do tank for those cities. So we, the professional staff, are pushing and advising mayors on how we give them a lot of private advice, how they're doing against what they should be doing on climate, how they're progressing against their own targets, measuring them against other cities. So there's a sort of nice positive competition within the network. They're all competing for investment, for companies to come, for the best people to come and work in those cities. But it's a race to the top. That's the nice thing. These mayors recognise that the way to make their city more attractive and all those metrics is that it's clean, that it's's green, they're getting rid of pollution and they've got international standing, because there's part of helping solve the world's problems, not make them worse wow, well, actually very ambitious goals.
Speaker 2:Uh, an enormous network around the globe. Everything is so big, but my question will be simple, but big at the same time. Is it worth it? Because how critical are cities in delivering a stable future climate? Is it worth this work?
Speaker 4:well, I've got to say absolutely, but the data would would would agree with me, would back me up, because I first just a real simple fact Most of us around the world live in cities, now live in urban places. It's where the vast majority of things are consumed and therefore where most emissions are created 70%, 80%, depending on how you calculate it. But I think actually the more important thing, given our failure to deal with the climate crisis, is not one of lack of knowledge. We've had all the data and understanding we need for for the 20 years I've been working on this. It's not a lack of knowing what to do and being you know, being able to, to copy it. It's a lack of political leadership and an inability to overcome the really strong forces in the fossil fuel industry and elsewhere that are trying to hold that progress back and what you really get.
Speaker 4:The reason I I focus my time on cities is that's where I see the strongest political leadership on climate, amongst mayors and city leaders, but particularly because they're more internationalized. They're more willing to collaborate and work together, and seeing the mayors of new york and beijing and london sitting down together and learning from each other in a way that just wouldn't happen between the leaders of those nation states, sadly, who are more likely to be confronting each other with trade barriers or the armies in the worst situation. And that's where I feel kind of hope that you really can get global collaboration that can propel us forward and as the cities, the big cities of the world are the places that people aspire to live, if you can show that you can have fully electric bus fleets in the big cities of the world, then that can translate across to the nations, for example, so, mark, I've got a question on that.
Speaker 3:Just briefly, I do. I want to get into what the sort of three or four really major policy measures are for cities that they can take. But before we get into that, I just wonder what your reflection is on the changing global picture of politics and cities, because you've got an incredible network that's quite collaborative and yet we have quite bad political polarization happening in key areas of the world. And are you picking up that sort of tension in the work of the network itself?
Speaker 4:So I'd say we've absolutely felt that polarization in terms of the additional pressure that it's putting on city governments and mayors that are trying to do the right thing on climate, trying to create clean air, trying to trying to cut emissions.
Speaker 4:We haven't felt it in terms of tension within the network itself. So the geopolitical tensions that absolutely are there between China and the US don't manifest themselves very much in the city's network, thankfully. But what we really do see is thisational strength and finance of the fossil fuel industry, allied to the alt-right, the conspiracy theorists who now have got a template that they use any time a city government is going to introduce a low emission zone or a clean air zone or is going to introduce policies that are broadly about making more green space, 15-minute cities, making it easier for people to travel without having to use the car. You see it time after time suddenly this kind of apparent local swelling up of opposition to things that previously everyone thought was a good idea. But always behind it is money that's coming from foundations in the US linked back to fossil fuel companies, and that's the additional pressure for us.
Speaker 2:Well, that's interesting because it also opens up another door about communication and setting an example for all of us. This experience of collaboration and negotiation and learning from each other also may set some examples of solving issues on negotiation base in the politics arena well, yeah, actually.
Speaker 4:I mean we're that's, we're trying to achieve just that at the moment.
Speaker 4:There was a little heralded, um positive agreement at cop 28 in dubai, which has got a dreadful acronym CHAMP, but it was an agreement by 72 nation states that they would relook at their national climate commitments, their so-called NDCs, that they have to represent next year as part of the Paris Agreement and they're supposed to be consistent with the world halving emissions by 2030.
Speaker 4:None of them are anywhere near it at the moment, but those 72 countries agreed to re-look at their national commitments in the light of what's happening at the sub-national level, so at local authority and, in the case where they've got state regional governments, what's happening there.
Speaker 4:On the premise and c40 was very much part of of creating this agreement, led, in fact, by the UAE top presidency that just simply mathematically, most nation states don't count what's happening at the local level. If they just counted it, it would automatically push up the national commitment. But even more if they got behind it and thought what are the regulations that we can put in place to make it easier for the mayors to introduce those low emission zones or make it easier for mayors to bring in the tougher green building codes that require all authorities and funding them to be able to capture the methane from waste that is often the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in those cities, and if you do that, you can get a lot closer to where the countries need to be, but allowing the local level political leaders to take a lot of the political heat which they're willing to do because they think it can be popular with their, with their city electorates so mark, if we skip over the champ acronym, which is not great, in fact.
Speaker 3:While we're on acronyms, I remember there was an eu project that I worked on which is about extreme heat and climate, and it was called scorchio. How, anyway? Um so, just just so people get a really good sense you almost in this space a minute ago. What are the sort of three or four really key policy interventions or action interventions across cities that you think really need to accelerate from the network?
Speaker 4:Well, you know, if you just do it from a quantification basis, most emissions in cities come from energy consumed in buildings, obviously. So it's the kind of thing that New York has done with its local law 97 that has set a really tough regulatory mandate for all those skyscrapers in New York that within five or six years they've got to be comprehensively renovated so that they're well insulated both from the heat and the cold. New York gets those extremes and they're supplied by renewable energy rather than gas. And it comes with a corollary piece of regulation that says, essentially you can't fit a gas installation to a new building. That's the fuel of the past. Now you need to connect to renewable energy. What's happened as a result of that is huge job creation 40,000 and counting so far massive additional investment in renewable energy off the coast of New York, in wind power and in solar farms throughout the city. So it stimulated another economy.
Speaker 4:So number one is that building energy. If you tackle that in the richest cities in the global north, you're dealing with 40 or 50 percent of the problem. The second is how we travel within cities. Often cities have lower carbon footprints than the rural areas because we've got metros and buses and people can walk and cycle, but it can be extended so much further. The European examples are normally the best here the Copenhagen's, the Amsterdam's, et cetera, where over carefully, over decades, actually, the city has been designed so it's faster to get anywhere by bike, easy to get by walking, and if you can't do either of those things, you can hop on a mass transit, a public transport. You'd only take the car if you're doing a delivery or you've got a disability or whatever it is.
Speaker 4:That means you have to use that thing, and I think really the third thing which is not so much talked about, but is food. Because when we start looking at the consumption-based emissions of a city, so not just what's produced within the city, but tracing it back along the supply chains, particularly in the wealthier cities, it's the Western diet very high carbohydrate, large quantities of meat, mostly transported in from somewhere else around the world. Transported in from somewhere else around the world and often unnoticed, is city authorities. Local authorities are generally the single biggest purchaser of food within the geographical boundary of their jurisdiction. So just the decisions they make about the food that they're serving in schools, for example, can make a big difference to whole local food markets. And some great examples now and in unlikely places Sao Paulo, you know.
Speaker 4:Brazil, the beef center of the beef industry. In Milan in Italy, loving their cured meats. Both of those mayors have put in place policies that is progressively replacing meat protein with plant-based protein in school diets, with the support of parents and children. At every stage, they're giving them a choice did you prefer the veggie lasagna or the meat lasagna? The majority preferred the veggie lasagna. Okay, we'll take the meat lasagna off the menu this also sounds like good communication, steve right oh, absolutely.
Speaker 3:Also music to a vegan's ears as well I know, but we we need your.
Speaker 4:You know, one of the reasons I was so pleased to come on this podcast is we really need your creative input here, because I'd say the big challenge link in all of those together is how you communicate, particularly when we haven't just got to put the facts in front of people, and people will see the facts and then appreciate them and kind of say, yeah, we all want clean air. When there's a battle going on, when there's a very well-organized opposition that is trying to persuade people that having a clean air zone is an affront to your freedom, it's taking away your civil rights, and often it's the simple choices around messaging Are we talking about a clean air zone or are we talking about an ultra-low emission zone? The latter doesn't tend to do very well in a focus group. The former tends to do quite well.
Speaker 2:So communication is always the key, but also what you communicate is important too. And when we talk about the climate action, as you put it in some sentences just before, we have other core benefits like health, green jobs, etc. It goes on. So how do those co-benefits play into climate action planning from your experience, and how to communicate the benefits of those?
Speaker 4:I think there's been quite a change in the last four or five years on this. I would have said always. For our group of political leaders, being able to show that they were affecting people's immediate daily lives is paramount, and jobs is right at the top of that kind of security of income. But it didn't stray too much into the actual discussion around climate, where mayors are often pretty data-driven. They can see the data in front of them. We need to cut the emissions. This is my legacy as a politician. Therefore, I'm going to do the right thing with it.
Speaker 4:What we've seen since the pandemic is really those two things coming completely together and we really we pivoted completely in the pandemic.
Speaker 4:At one point almost everybody at C40 was working on pandemic response, not climate change, because that's what we had to do, because what all our mayors were focused on.
Speaker 4:But then we came out of that with a real focus on a green recovery from the pandemic and at the top of that list has been really demonstrating that the path to more jobs and better jobs well-paid, trade unionised jobs that people can be secure in is much better, the faster we get to a green economy than if cities tried to stick with the old fossil fuel related industries in their cities. I think that's very clear. When you look at the evidence, it's much harder to persuade people of that because any kind of change is feared, particularly when it's the thing that matters most to my employment, and so we do a lot of work now on. Age has proven the case that it's not just there'll be more jobs in general in a green economy, but your particular job can transfer from its current well-paid fossil fuel related job to a well-paid, good job in the green economy, and that that has to get very local and you've got to talk to the actual people that are affected. You can't do it through slogans and through communicating at a high level.
Speaker 3:I think Mark my question now because I'm responding to what you said and I think it's going to be a messy question.
Speaker 3:So if I get to the end of this question, you'd think I have absolutely no idea what just came out of Steve's mouth.
Speaker 3:That's fine, but I'm fascinated by this because COVID and the green recovery narrative that we all worked on and we even did a bit of work with C40 on it we did a toolkit for cities and how to get the messaging right on it I found all of that fascinating because in the space of a couple of months, basically the world deployed exactly the same amount of effort it needed to do to defeat the climate crisis, to address COVID.
Speaker 3:And what's really interesting is, if you crunch the actual numbers here in the UK, roughly about the same amount of money was expended on COVID response as we need to decarbonize, which blows my mind a little bit. But I wonder whether, on the communication of all of this which you've alluded to, do we leave it too late. So do we not build enough traction with our communities and with our citizens around a sort of low carbon culture, if you will, and then all of a sudden we're trying to talk to people about a clean air zone, literally a few weeks or months before it comes into being. I wonder whether we need to do more work on hearts and minds much earlier in the process, before we try and intervene. What do you think on that?
Speaker 4:100% agree with you and even if it taking the examples where things have been the absolute best, with the best of intention. Now former mayor of Los Angeles, eric Garcetti is now the US ambassador to India. Really amazing, thoughtful mayor was the chair of C40. He took the really tough decision to close down the two gas plants that the city energy utility owned, or announced that they would be closed 10 years ahead of their natural lifetime. And when he did it he 100 percent guaranteed no job losses. Everybody employed by the gas utility would be redeployed into the new massive investment in the renewable energy infrastructure and retrofitted.
Speaker 4:And yet still the trade unions representing workers in those industries came out against the policy because they just feared change. They just didn't trust anybody to actually retain the jobs that were already there. They defended what they already had. What subsequently happened and the mayor did exactly the right thing was he didn't kind of then crumble and give up on the policy. He set up a just transition commission that brought in all of those trade unions and through very painstaking, slow, careful work over a couple of years now has been, and C4 has been very heavily involved and in fact we involve the international trade unions almost as kind of peacemakers to kind of come in and help the conversation. Gradually that opposition is dissipating and trust and belief that the training programs are there, that the jobs are starting to materialize. But it had to be really focused on the individual workers and their families and their communities.
Speaker 2:Well, I was going to go for the last question, but I have another one now, Steve, if it's OK. So we talk about the communications, the general messaging on climate action and then, in other levels, communicating the benefits and so on. But with all this, what you just now told us brings me to the question of we also have to communicate to building trust. So how will we match all these different communications and messages and match them with the actions? Also, because building trust is very, very intangible, but it's crucial when we're talking about collaboration with so many different stakeholders and it also needs other messages than the benefits and so on, and it also needs more than messages. It needs some kind of evidence. What do you think on that?
Speaker 4:Well, hopefully this will be music to your ears, but I think we need you know I work with governments, so I'll come at it from that perspective City governments need, governments in general need to have put as much effort and thought and planning and strategy into how they are going to build support for the policy as they do to designing the policy itself and do it at the same time. So you're you're preparing the ground and building, engaging with communities, building up that support base before the policy itself comes in, and and so that you're kind of part way this too often the one thing happens after the other and the budget for the engagement and the communicating is tiny in relation to the policy development. And that's particularly important. And I know I keep coming back to this because we're in a battle here.
Speaker 4:Unfortunately I don't like using that aggressive language, but there's a fight. There's a fossil fuel industry that is spending hundreds of millions, billions of dollars trying to prevent those of us that are trying to save humanity for future human civilization and trying to stop good policy. That's going to come under attack and lots of people are going to be persuaded through misinformation and disinformation that actually it's some insidious plots to take away their freedoms and when you look at the kind of people's reasons for opposing really logical things like having a park or cleaner vehicles or or whatever it is, is often it's about the process. That's the thing they're riled about that they weren't asked, they weren't involved, nobody talked to me, but it's in my neighborhood and that you know that communication and engaging with at every level of the community is the only way you can overcome that brilliant.
Speaker 3:I couldn't agree more, mark. We're going to come to the last question now, actually, but on that I I think let's continue talking because we recently did. We managed to get the clean air zone in the city of newcastle introduced without the sky falling in, and it's because we did exactly that. It was sequential. We first of all established over about three months that everybody quite like clean air, and that was all we focused on before we started talking about anything, just to establish commonality around all of that. So last question to you, mark Our network of agencies is called Do Not Smile for a very specific reason. It's ironic because we think sustainability is something that needs to bring happiness into the world. So final question is what object, place or person always makes you smile, mark? Final question is what object, place or person?
Speaker 4:always makes you smile, mark. Well, you know what I'm going to just go with. What made me smile last night I went. I went to see the amazing uh nigh uh play about nigh bevan and the nhs uh at the national theatre in london. But then just walking out across london, across Millennium Bridge, looking down the Thames on a beautiful night, just you know, brought back all my kind of faith in the world. Having, you know, first having that kind of community based we all contribute to something that benefits us all kind of message of the NHS, and then seeing my wonderful city of London at night, that makes me happy, happy that's a beautiful thing, mark.
Speaker 3:Weirdly, I was on the millennium bridge myself yesterday, but a little bit earlier in the day. Um, so well that's been. That's been a brilliant conversation. I'm really quite powerfully struck mark by um that the the sustaining this huge network of really powerful global cities at times of extreme change and polarisation, but keeping that dialogue going is extraordinary actually and really exciting. I'm coming away with a big old chunk of hope for the future. Damla, I really am Over to you.
Speaker 2:So thanks to everyone who has listened to our Good Guys podcast, brought to you by the Do Not Smile network of agencies.
Speaker 3:And make sure you listen to future episodes, where we'll be talking to more amazing people about how we can work together to create a more sustainable future. So, mark Damla, see you soon.
Speaker 2:See you.
Speaker 4:See you.
Speaker 1:Good Guys, a podcast series on sustainability Hosted by Damla Özler and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network.
