UN climate talks must include cities, businesses or risk irrelevance
9 October 2019
In his article for Climate Home News, Oxford Martin Senior Fellow and Post-Carbon Transition Programme Research Lead Thomas Hale writes that since the first UN Climate Summit in 2014, the “groundswell” of climate action from cities, business, and other actors has reached massive scale. It is estimated that one in five people live in cities or regions taking climate action, and that the thousands of companies taking action have a combined annual revenue totaling over 40% of GDP.
With the current arrangements for these "climate-action stakeholders" in the UN climate process expiring in 2020, Hale argues that it is vital that the mandate for these actors be extended to bolster the core architecture of the Paris Agreement by aligning it with dynamism of climate action on the ground.