Local action is key to achieving real progress on goals to curb climate change and adapt to its effects, urban leaders and activists say

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – From Durban, South Africa, to West Chester, Pennsylvania, local and municipal governments are trying to do their part to slow the advance of global climate change and adapt their communities to new climate realities, as laid out in the latest IPCC report by scientists this week.

Their methods vary, and focus on everything from better education to cutting emissions. Their success varies as well. Some have completed ambitious projects, while others struggle for the smallest amounts of attention and funding. Assistance from national governments or international institutions can be spotty, if it comes at all.

Action on “climate change is often thought of as a voluntary activity for local governments,” said Maryke van Staden, a programme manager for ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability. “They have the mandate for other things, but climate change is normally a national government mandate. So both in terms of budget and capacity, it’s quite often not at hand in municipalities.”

“The cities that have been able to move on it have established a priority and embedded it into their whole system,” she said.

LEARNING TO ADAPT IN DURBAN

The city of Durban, South Africa, is one of those. Despite being one of the poorest large cities in the country, it has turned itself into a global model for local-level climate change adaptation.

The Durban Adaptation Charter, passed at UN climate negotiations held in Durban in 2011, commits local governments around the world to take adaptation seriously and act on it to a reasonable degree. It has been signed by more than 1,100 local governments or organisations, spanning the globe from Norway to Argentina.

One example of an initiative in Durban itself is the city’s “green roof” project, which has “highlighted the value of green roofs in encouraging inner-city biodiversity, also as a potential source of inner-city food security and a tool to reduce the impacts of the urban heat island and increased storm water runoff,” according to a report produced by the city’s climate protection managers.

Debra Roberts heads Durban’s Environmental Planning and Climate Protection Department, where she has been working for 10 years. Over that time, she has learned difficult lessons about local climate change policy, experiencing “some good successes, some very disastrous failures, but all learning experiences along the way.”

“Durban really stands apart from many other cities around the world in that our work is predominantly adaptation based,” Roberts said. She explained that of the two main types of climate change action – adaptation to climate change impacts and mitigation of climate changing emissions - adaptation is more suited to local governments because it is very location-specific, compared to mitigation which needs to take place on a global scale.

“Adaptation is local,” she said. “Mitigation is a much more international response, because there’s one singular problem, and there are a limited set of tools to address that. It doesn’t matter where that carbon dioxide is produced or sucked out of the atmosphere. Adaptation is context specific. The adaptive needs of Durban are very different to the adaptive needs of Cape Town.”

Beyond that recognition, the obstacles to acting on adaptation, or even talking about it, are many, Roberts said.

“The challenge landscape is so complex, one can’t really suss out one discreet element and say this is the biggest one,” she said. “It’s the interplay that creates the problem. It’s a combination, for example, of politicians who don’t believe that climate change is real combined with the fact that we had no initial funding, combined with the fact that there’s such a huge brain drain (from emigration from South Africa), combined with the fact that the development agendas are overwhelming.”

But despite those challenges, in Durban, at least, the local governing body, starting from essentially very little, has made significant progress.

One example of the work done in Durban is ambitious reforestation work taking place near the city. As part of green development efforts surrounding the 2010 World Cup, which took place in Durban and other cities in South Africa, a number of large-scale community reforestation initiatives were established near the city, the first of which was located in the buffer zone around a landfill.

According to a report by the city leadership, “this project created jobs for local community members in managing the nursery and planting the trees on site, and provided others with the opportunity to become ‘treepreneurs’ by growing locally sourced indigenous seedlings for the project.”

In implementing Durban’s green push, “there was no grand plan in the beginning because there was no precedent and we didn’t know enough. What we’ve done is taken small steps, learned within the context of taking those steps, and either changed direction or built on the previous work to take it forward,” Roberts said.

The keys to success, she added, are patience and intuition.

“These complex problems are not amenable to logical, linear solutions. It’s about playing at the socio-institutional landscape, it’s about building champions in the right places, it’s about positioning power bases relative to other power bases in a way that gives you opportunities, both political and economic … It’s about being opportunistic and knowing when to step forward and when to step back,” she said.

STRUGGLING FOR A VOICE IN PENNSYLVANIA

On a much smaller scale, it can sometimes be difficult for local community activists for climate action to be heard amid a din of interests, or to get proposals past everything from annoyed neighboring towns to apathetic governments.

In West Chester, Pennsylvania, a small university town 40 km (25 miles) west of Philadelphia, a volunteer, ad-hoc committee of the local governing council has been unsuccessfully advocating for the renewal of a passenger rail service to Philadelphia since 2006.

West Chester was the start of a rail line that went to Philadelphia until 1986, when that section of the line was discontinued due to track deterioration and low ridership, according to a case study provided by ICLEI.

In recent years, automobile use has risen while public transportation use has fallen, meaning that West Chester’s transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions have climbed.

Community activists would like to renovate the rail line and renew rail service, as a way of cutting those emissions. But various challenges have gotten in the way, including a lack of money, bureaucracy, politics and a “not-in-my-backyard” attitude about the rail line from neighbouring communities.

“The challenge is to divert public money from road repair and expansion (funded by gasoline taxes) toward public transportation projects (funded by sporadic legislation for specific projects) to meet the needs of the next generation of commuters,” said Jim Wylie, head of the West Chester Borough Leaders United for Emissions Reduction (BLUER) committee on transportation.

But making such changes has been far from easy. One of the keys to success, he said, is being ready to use whatever limited funding becomes available, and having a plan ready for whatever becomes available next.

“A big part of politics is setting priorities on what we should do with our collective pile of tax dollars,” he said. “But you can do a lot with existing funding, if you are willing to wait for the right opportunity.”

For instance, he said, “when that road is re-paved and re-striped, add a bike lane. When a new development is proposed for Route 3, encourage the developer to put in new sidewalks and a bus stop on Route 3. I find that a lot can be done just by supporting the existing plans that the professional planners have written down.”

And political timing is as important as financial timing, according to Wylie. “The short game, in my mind, is recognizing that, at least in Pennsylvania, we tend to swing from liberal to conservative leadership. If you have a friendly administration in office, work hard to get your projects started because the next administration might not be so friendly,” he said.

29 LEVELS OF BUREAUCRACY IN INDONESIA

The challenges facing local climate change action are also evident in Indonesia where bureaucracy, a lack of communication, and limited funds have held up an innovative forest management program.

Starting in 2009, a government-regulated program aimed to grant communities permits to manage forests near them, with an overall target of communities managing 2.5 million hectares (6 million acres). The programme aimed to raise family incomes and benefit forest ecosystems, as well as protect forests, which store carbon dioxide and help curb climate change.

However, according to the Partnership for Governance Reform in Indonesia, only 326,000 hectares - 13 percent of the target – had been allocated for community-based forest management by the end of 2013.

Bureaucracy and budget are the major holdups. The community-based forest management programme is held back by a small budget of 21 billion Indonesian rupiah ($1.8 million), which is less than 1 percent of the forestry ministry’s annual budget of 6 trillion rupiah ($514 million), experts said.

It is also hindered by bureaucracy. Applications for the program are first filed with the local government and are subsequently handled by up to 29 desks and four levels of officials before they reach the national forestry minister for final approval.

The quickest that an application can be approved is 180 days, or 6 months.

Hasbi Berliani, program manager for sustainable environmental governance at the Partnership for Governance Reform, said that weak coordination between central and local governments is a major obstacle, and that better communication is necessary before the project can move forward more successfully.

WORKING AT ALL LEVELS

Two members of international organisations who work with local governments agreed that while local organising is vital to climate action at the local level, cooperation at multiple levels is the most effective way forward.

“You need improved multi-level governance approaches, to enable local government to effectively act,” said Van Staden of ICLEI. “You need the capacity, staff, budget, and knowledge. You need stakeholders from different areas, making the flow of money and knowledge easier.”

“All of this work happens at the local level, but it needs the national enabling framework to be on board,” she concluded.

Adam Matthews, secretary general of GLOBE International (the Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment) concurred.

“If you’re able to energise, coordinate and really drive as much action as possible at all levels, that really is the best approach. It’s not either/or, it’s a combination of all,” he said.

Looking ahead to the UN conference on climate change in Paris in 2015, where nations aim to create a new global pact on climate change action to replace the Kyoto Protocol, Matthews said political actors at all levels have a responsibility to try to drive international action.

“The key question is, ‘What sort of combinations sufficiently drive the level of ambition of the international community?’ And the more action there is at the provincial, state, and national level, the greater chance that in Paris 2015 you will have the opportunity for a more ambitious agreement,” he said.

CHANGE IN THE TRENCHES

Wylie of West Chester said that people can’t leave the process of making change up to professional planners, a belief that has led him to become involved in local advocacy and policy-making.

“When I was working 60 hours a week … I had no time or interest in thinking about how to make life better for commuters 10, 20, 30 years from now,” said the activist, who is now retired from his job as an engineer. Many people believe that if authorities want them to take public transportation, those authorities should make it fast, cheap and convenient for users, now. If not and “driving is my best option, then I’m driving,” he said.

“But now that I’ve got time to think about these things I’ve come to realise that if everyone has this same attitude, nothing is going to change,” Wylie said. “More traffic congestion, more greenhouse gas emissions, more roads to keep up with the demand of more cars.”

Roberts of Durban said local action is crucial to ensuring effective action on climate change.

“By the time you get to those lofty levels (of UN climate talks and international institutions), they do nothing that makes any real difference,” she charged. “They’re so far from the real work that they’ve lost the plot now.”

“I want to ensure that what I do on a day-to-day basis makes a difference, and you can’t do that anywhere but locally anymore,” she said.

Samuel Mintz is an AlertNet Climate intern.

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.