The Lima Accord also prioritizes "opportunities with high mitigation potential, including those with adaptation, health and sustainable development co-benefits," and specifies "the period 2015-2020 for initiating such actions." In other words, time to get going immediately.  

The Citizen's Climate Lobby notes that the Lima Accord sets a new standard for stakeholder engagement by calling for "meaningful and regular" consultation with civil society, women, youth, and indigenous peoples. This points to building direct citizen engagement into the process, both locally and globally, with the potential for simultaneously reducing inequities while driving improved policy choices.

This is good news and echoes Ecocity Builders' similar stance on climate change solutions. The EcoCitizen World Map Project (EWMP), already or soon to be under implementation in Egypt, Morocco, Peru, Colombia and the United Arab Emirates, helps ensure equitable and grassroots interventions to reduce city and neighborhood vulnerability to climate change. The Platform provides the incentive and understanding for communities to crowd-source urban data and holistically assess the condition of their neighborhoods. This promotes more democratic and grassroots leadership in proposing and planning interventions that directly enhance the sustainability and equitability of cities.   

 

 

 

 

Kirstin Miller, Executive Director

Keeper of the International Ecocity Conference Series, Ecocity Builders is a non-profit organization dedicated to reshaping cities, towns and villages for long-term health of human and natural systems.

The 20th United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) is taking place in Lima this week, with  Ecocity Builders in attendance. Lima is an obvious choice to host this gathering focused on solutions to climate change. Lima is the 2nd largest desert city, right behind Cairo, and estimated to be the third-worst affected country by climate change, after Honduras and Bangladesh, according to the University of East Anglia's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

Lima lies in the great rain shadow of Peru, sandwiched between the Andes and the sea. The area sees less than a third of an inch of rainfall per year. The bulk of Lima's municipal water comes from rivers fed by Andean glacier melt. But over the past decade the glaciers have all but disappeared, and mountain rainfall has declined as well. Lima is poised on a precipice of a frightening future. Over the edge is imminent water shortage. City officials are looking for alternatives with increasing urgency.

We're no stranger to drought here in California. Despite the plentiful early winter rain, cities, agriculture and industry in the lower half of the state are still threatened with running dry. While bad luck and climate change can be blamed for the shortages, there's another human villain behind the misfortune: bad planning. Problems arise when cities don't take into account the resource flows of the ecosystems they exist in. Problems arise when humans put their plans and values above the basic facts of the environment that needs to support them.

Unfortunately we are picking up the bill for decisions--both deliberate and unintentional--made be previous generations. Lima, a city of 9 million, shouldn't have been built in the 2nd driest desert in the world. But we have to work with what we've got. So what can we do? 

So here I am, fresh off the proverbial boat to witness Week 2 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Lima, Peru, aka COP20, or the 20th session of the Conference of the Parties, which, frankly, feels like the 200th.

To be sure, under normal circumstances I would have no business getting airlifted here at the expense of a monster carbon footprint, just to post some morbid humor and be another dog barking up the same tree. However, I was asked to make the trip down here to be part of the Ecocity Builders team, presenting our participatory ecocitizen mapping project to various stakeholders, and to network with local organizations to get the help we'll need to set up neighborhood survey teams here in Lima, our newly announced 4th pilot city.

Turning the traditional top-down approach to urban planning on its head, this new approach uses a framework known as Participatory Action Research (PAR) that challenges structural barriers to information and provides opportunities for communities to directly lead the research process, in an attempt to create community-generated solutions in urban planning and public policy.

Not exactly goose bump-inducing language, so let me paraphrase: Power to the People! If we want to keep our mothership afloat, we've got to educate, engage, and inspire people wherever they are.