Cities must invest $375 billion to avoid catastrophic global climate change

Cities around the world need $375 billion in green investment to avoid catastrophic global climate change, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group says.

According to a report by Arup on behalf of the C40 group, without serious action before 2020, the world will have locked in future emissions to the point where global temperatures will surpass the 2 degrees Celsius mark—the upper safe limit in the Paris Climate Agreement. The report says that megacities need to reduce their average emissions from more than five tons of carbon per capita today to around 2.9 tons over the next decade.

The report provides guidelines for global cities to take 14,000 climate actions over the next four years in transportation, efficiency, energy production, and waste management in order to reduce emissions. If C40 cities and their partners take on the recommended actions, the report says they can deliver 51% of the carbon reductions necessary to ensure cities are on course with Paris Agreement objectives. The remaining 49% of emission reductions would need to come from external structural changes such as de-carbonizing national energy supplies.

Established 11 years ago, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group includes more than 85 world cities, representing more than 650 million people and one-quarter of the global economy.

New York City has two very large buildings dedicated to answering the 911 calls of its five boroughs. With more than 11 million emergency calls annually, it makes perfect sense. The second of these buildings, the Public Safety Answering Center II (PSAC II) is located on a nine-acre parcel of land in the Bronx. It’s an imposing 450,000 square-foot structure—a 240-foot-wide by 240-foot-tall cube. The gleaming aluminum cube risesthe equivalent of 24 stories from behind a grassy berm, projecting the unlikely impression that it might actually be floating. Like most visually striking structures, the building has drawn as much scorn as it has admiration.