International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives Promotes Local Sustainable Efforts

Many of our readers are not familiar with ICLEI, its mission, or how it's organized. How would you summarize your organization's activities?

"Local action moves the world" is the primary focus of ICLEI's mission. We're a membership organization representing 12 global offices on every continent. We're beginning to do pilot work in China. We work from the bottom up. We focus, in a non-advocacy, non-partisan way, on providing tools and technical expertise to local governments across the planet that want to engage in climate and sustainability work, to reduce their environmental impacts, protect public health, protect public infrastructure, and improve the quality of life and livability in cities across the planet.

How is ICLEI governed? How geographically diverse is the leadership?

We are governed by an executive committee comprised of 52 elected officials from different continents across the world. We meet annually with the executive committee providing governance and guidance. Structurally, we mirror the U.N. We have a secretary general, Konrad Otto-Zimmerman, from Germany, a world secretariat that's seated in Toronto, Canada, and 11 other offices, each with either regional directors or executive directors.

There's only one cross-cutting position that holds, across all offices, a different level of authority to set policy, which is the International Climate Director, simply because we've acknowledged that it's a global organization. Consistent, collaborative action between the offices driving local government work can effectively address climate change.

You're just back from ICLEI's Sundance Summit, a mayors' gathering on climate protection, which is your annual leadership conference. What resulted from that meeting?

The annual leadership event that we do at the U.S. office is called the Sundance Summit, which very specifically targets mayors in the country who have either not yet initiated work around climate change in their cities, or they've indicated they want to but aren't quite sure how to get started.

It's a two-and-a-half day event that focuses on bringing the best-in-class technical experts, scientists, and policy victors together with mayors in one room in an intimate, natural environment-the Sundance Resort. This year our president, who is the elected official leading ICLEI (he's a council member from Vancouver, British Columbia), David Cadman, myself, and technical experts within the climate community, came together to help mayors understand what tools, technical expertise, latest technologies, and latest climate science are at their disposal-what they can use as they craft and begin to implement their local climate work.

What is the mission, reach, and the goal for ICLEI's Cities for Climate Protection Campaign?

The Cities for Climate Protection Campaign is focused, and has been since its inception in 1993, on helping cities establish their baseline inventory of greenhouse gas emissions, first and foremost. You cannot know what an achievable target is or where you're going if you don't know where you're starting. So, the baseline inventory is step one.

Step two: based on that baseline, setting an achievable target. As an organization, ICLEI does not endorse any international target or international treaty. However, if asked, we would certainly support the international scientific community's assertion of around 80 percent reductions by 2050. Nevertheless, when we're working with local governments, we help them set targets that we believe are achievable and ambitious. Based on history, we know that if there is a target that a city achieves in half the time they've set out for themselves, the next time they set a target will be even more progressive.

Step three: develop a climate action plan-actually begin to write the road map of how you're going to execute the achievement of the target. Step four: implementation of the climate action plan. Step five: continual improvement and monitoring.

The bottom line value that local governments derive from participating in the Cities for Climate Protection Campaign (CCP) is the fact that they can quantifiably track their reductions and report to their communities and council members the reductions that they're able to achieve in CO2 and other greenhouse gases that cause global warming. They can also establish criteria for air pollutants that contribute directly to air pollution and form compliance with the Clean Air Act, etc.

The other very significant value around applying the CCP methodology is the fact that reductions can result in identification of equivalent cost savings by using the software tools that we provide to cities. In other words, in 2005, the local governments participating in the CCP in the United States reduced their greenhouses gases by 23 million tons for a cost-saving equivalent of more than $550 million. That goes directly back into local budgets. Those kinds of numbers are compelling for local governments as they begin to wrestle with their budget process and what kind of capital investments they'll make in climate work. The end point that we've discovered by doing this work for more than a decade is that climate work and climate actions are absolutely good for business. They're solid investments, and they render a return on the investment in a relatively short period.

Your description above implies that we have an agreed-upon international standard for measuring and verifying carbon production. How sophisticated is carbon measurement today, and what are you relying on to support your data?

We are actually driving the standard itself. Within each sector right now-both in the country and around the planet-there is a relative sense of urgency to establish a series of protocols. Those protocols represent the standards by which we hope all sectors will measure their progress. The reason for that, and the reason is both urgent and imperative, is that if the different sectors are not measuring in similar ways, targets can't be achieved and the ultimate impact of our reductions of the current rate of global warming can't be reasonably measured.

If the city of Delhi in India and the city of Berlin in Germany and the city of Cape Town in South Africa are not using the same methodology to track and measure their greenhouse gas reductions, there's no way that we can begin to capture the aggregated impact that local government action represents in the scheme of global warming.

The local government protocol on greenhouse gas emissions that we're about to publish will set forward a standard that's been weighed in upon by the expert stakeholders and the leading ranking and indexing institutions on the planet. But we've all come to a level of agreement on how things should be counted and passed forward in order to assure that local governments are counting apples to apples when they're doing their climate work.

Into the future, we're not that far out from beginning to see how the standards prescribed in the local government protocol can inform how public credits of CO2 will be brought to bear in the carbon market. But that's still a little ways out.

You recently spoke at the U.N.'s 60th Annual Department of Public Information and Non-Governmental Organizations conference, which had the theme "Climate Change and How it Affects Us All." Can you give us a sense of the core message you delivered at that event?

The primary message that I brought forward at that conference is the need for transparency in reporting data and the integrity of that data. We also need to ensure that local government action will be accounted for-not just acknowledged, but accounted for-in the international treaty dialogue, with the recognition that local government action has been most effective and swift in its response, both domestically and internationally.

That's been acknowledged. However, the voice of local governments at the table in the international treaty community has not been confirmed by, for example, the United Nations Conference of the Parties. They have not yet brought forward a formal seat at the table for local government representation in the post-Kyoto dialogue, which is crucial.

What should the post-Kyoto dialogue be about? With the U.N. conference in Bali in December, the work you're doing with ICLEI-what should the next conversation be about?

The conversation absolutely must learn the lessons from the existing treaty, i.e., what did and did not work around the current Kyoto Protocol. Also, and no less important, we must push the fact that we now have 100 percent consensus from the international scientific community that the current rate of global warming is absolutely caused by human impact. The international scientific community has supported the reduction imperative of 80 percent reductions of greenhouse gases by the year 2050.

Post-Kyoto, the dialogue and the treaty resulting from that-if there is a treaty-absolutely must be focused on how we get there. What's reasonable, and what's an equitable distribution of responsibility? That is one of the primary areas where the Kyoto Protocol failed. How do we actually tackle this challenge in a way that effectively addresses it and enables all nations to move forward with their implementation measures that effectively address the issue?

You're the executive director of ICLEI's U.S. office. No collective body of officials speaks with one voice, but what are the common threads in what you're hearing from your members about climate change?

In the United States, the primary message we're hearing from local governments and elected officials is the need for accountability by the federal government for the actions and the measures they've already taken and they're taking in the future as our Congress engages in a deeper dialogue. We all know there will be legislation passed in 2008 addressing climate for local governments here domestically. The fear is that the legislation will result in unfunded mandates being passed down.

Internationally, the almost 1,000 local governments representing ICLEI speak to the need for equitable distribution of responsibility in how the issue of climate change is addressed. For example, the voice of local governments coming out of India is one of the need for those local governments to have equal access to development and a certain level of technology and industrialization without being penalized for their impacts. They're still looking across the pond, so to speak, and saying, "The Western world is only where it is because they grew rapidly, without any restraint. Why constrain our growth and evolution? It's unfair."

What's emerged in the international local government community is the imperative upstream to higher governance levels that equity in the international treaty dialogue must be addressed in the distribution of any kind of regulatory imperative that will ultimately impact local governments.

What do the local governments and officials that you're speaking with see as the most promising renewables and technology to mitigate the carbon emissions in their countries and economic infrastructure?

Right now, it's not necessarily a technology but the recognition that the built environment, both existing and new, holds some of the greatest potential to have very swift and deep reductions in global warming, as well as capturing cost-savings through energy efficiency. That's where we've seen the swiftest uptake by local governments in recent months. Prior to that, a lot of it has been centered on transportation.

Especially in the middle part of the country, most of the work that we're doing with local governments focuses on how to drive energy efficiency measures at the local level. That is all motivated more by rising energy costs rather than the fear of the impacts of global warming. I think we will begin to see an inversion of the motivating factors as we continue to see more intensive climatic events attributed back to the rate of global warming.

For now, however, local governments are really trying to respond to outcry from their communities and their constituents that rising energy costs are untenable into the future. So local governments are rapidly trying to figure out how to get more access to green and renewable power on the grid. We know that even though the technologies are there, that doesn't mean that they won't continually improve. We need to open up much broader application of renewable sources on a grid that's primarily controlled by two power administrations.