C40 CEO: China gives hope to the world that we can tackle the climate crisis

At the 2023 World Cities Day event held in Shanghai, Mark Watts, executive director of C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40), had an interview with media.

In the interview, he said: “China gives hope to the world that we can actually tackle the climate crisis just on the really big numbers.”

He noted that over the past several years, 40% of the new renewable energy capacity has been developed in China, and the adoption of electric vehicles in cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen has been accelerated. By 2025, 96% of the buses will be fully electric in major cities in China, and Shenzhen has already achieved this goal. These figurehs are way ahead of Europe or North America.

China has made tremendous progress in many fields, especially in halving air pollution. Also, Los Angeles and Shanghai have established a partnership on building green ports and a green shipping network. Such efforts are to reduce maritime emissions.

When it comes to what China should do to show its leadership, Watts said that China had to go where the emissions were. Rapidly developing economies need to decarbonize new constructions, new infrastructure, buildings and transport lines. And China strengthening its building codes offered a lot of hope, he said. 

China is setting new directions in clean construction, and changing materials to reduce carbon in buildings.

Watts also shared his views on the theme of the 2023 World Cities Day, “Financing a Sustainable Urban Future for All”.

He said China is one of the best countries in the world for public investment in the climate crisis, he said, but globally too much money was flowing into developing new fossil fuel resources.

“Given the accelerated adverse impacts of climate change, such as the drought in Cape Town, the incredible storms in New York and Huston and flooding in Chicago, we need to shift more money into climate adaptation and climate mitigation,” he said.

Also, as the climate change is a global challenge, and more than half of the people on the planet are living in cities, he said cities can play a leadership role in this respect.

Watts said C40 is a global network of nearly 100 mayors of the world’s leading cities that are united in actions to confront the climate crisis. They come together to set standards, and leadership standards to work collaboratively and enable everyone to go at the fastest pace.

Actions by major cities like Shanghai and London send a massive signal to the international market, when they buy electric buses, or when they make regulations requiring buildings to have better energy performance standards.

Their acts shift the global markets. But it makes a lot more difference if lots of cities do it together at once, which is the purpose of C40 and of events like this.

When it came to another key term of the event, release resilience, Watts said that in the context of the climate crisis it meant being prepared for inevitable shocks, like weather-related shocks. He said that while authorities were designing policies to shift to a clean energy future, it had to retrain workers who were in the polluting industries and give them job opportunities.

“All the research we’ve done in C40 shows that actually there are far more jobs, and better jobs, the faster society moved to clean energy cities,” Watts said.

World Cities Day is the first international day established by the United Nations with a focus on cities. The genesis of World Cities Day can be traced back to the Shanghai Declaration, unveiled during the Expo 2010 Shanghai China Summit Forum. This declaration championed the establishment of World Cities Day. And it has served as a vital platform for cities worldwide to engage in dialogue and cooperation while intensifying international interest in urban development. Moreover, it has played an indispensable role in advancing global sustainable urban development, facilitating the realization of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the New Urban Agenda.