The World Summit of Mayors of C40 starts this Wednesday in the City of Buenos Aires and will bring together more than 100 community leaders from abroad and some 150 Argentine mayors who will debate with the intention of generating new consensus facing climate change and the challenge of carbon neutrality.
The international meeting will be held at the Recoleta Convention Center with the slogan “United in Action”, as organizations environmentalists and socialists planned a series of activities for these days as part of a “counter-summit” in which the environmental problems and the situation of the Buenos Aires district will be debated.
The summit begins this morning with a Federal Urban Forum, where 150 mayors will present a Declaration of Argentine Cities with commitments such as “limiting the temperature increase to 1.5°C and being carbon neutral by 2050”in addition to “publishing Greenhouse Gas Inventories and risk assessments.”
Among others, the mayors Pablo Javkin (Rosario), Martín Llaryora (Córdoba), Emilio Jatón (Santa Fe), Ulpiano Suárez (Mendoza), Eduardo Tassano (Corrientes), Gustavo Martinez (Resistance) and Bettina Romero (Salta) will participate.
This Thursday will be the official opening with welcoming words from the head of the Government of the City of Buenos Aires, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta; together with the mayor of London and president of C40 Cities, Sadiq Khan; and the Executive Director of C40 Cities, Mark Watts.
During tomorrow and Friday the mayors will debate climate commitments in three axes: green, fair and inclusive recovery with job creation; wellness cities; and green financing, with a special focus on Latin America; while the organizers anticipated that the intention is to generate the adherence of the cities to the “Consensus of Buenos Aires”.
Among the confirmed mayors are Anne Hidalgo, from Paris, Ana Colau, from Barcelona; Femke Halsema, from Amsterdam; Claudia López Hernández, from Bogotá; Claudio Orrego, from the Metropolitan Region of Santiago de Chile; Ricardo Nunes, from San Pablo; Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles; Eric Adams from New York and Oh Se-hoon from Seoul.
Likewise, the forum will convene more than a hundred international exhibitors, including Marty Walsh, Secretary of Labor of the United States; Sergio Díaz-Granados, president of CAF (Development Bank of Latin America); María Fernanda Garza, president of the International Chamber of Commerce, and María Neira, director of the Department of Public Health and the Environment at the World Health Organization (WHO).
It will incorporate, for the first time since the inaugural meeting in 2005, an agenda with meetings between the mayors and national and international leaders of the private sector to advance “joint solutions and results of public-private cooperation projects to reduce emissions in critical sectors and increase climate ambition.
There will be an agenda of activities for delegations outside the Convention Center that includes visits to the Recycling Center, the Ecological Reserve, the Ecopark, the Rodrigo Bueno neighborhood and the Historic District.
Parallel to the development of the forum in the Recoleta neighborhood, social and environmental organizations they will denounce, during a demonstration on the steps of the Paseo del Bajo, that “while the C40 is talking, the City of Buenos Aires cements, trees are felled, refreshing canopies are pruned and buildings are approved on the riverside contour”.
Also, more than 200 socio-environmental organizations and activists asked the head of the Buenos Aires Government to open an “instance of citizen participation” during the meeting and requested permission to install a tent on the esplanade of the Exhibition Center, a demand that has not yet been answered. .
Tomorrow there will be a “Citizen Summit” on Belgrano 2527of the City of Buenos Aires, under the premise “New Urbanities and Climate Crisis, where Jonatan Baldiviezo and Eva Koutsovitis, from the Movement “The City We Are Those Who Inhabit It” will present; the legislator of the Front of All Laura Velasco and the landscaper Fabio Márquez .
