GCAS: An Impossible Account of an Incredible Week (Part I)
In a four-part series from December 3–6, Michael Northrop, Director of the Sustainable Development Program at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, attempts to catalogue the deluge of commitments made at and around the September 2018 Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, California.
As the 24th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP24) gets underway today in Katowice, Poland, many in the climate community are looking for inspiration in the incredible successes made outside the international framework by cities, states, regions, and companies.
Most people think climate change has to be solved only by national governments and the United Nations. But over the past 25 years, as national governments have struggled and often failed to address climate change adequately, it has been so-called sub-national leaders who have moved fastest to pilot ways forward. Local, regional, and corporate decision makers have often been able to move faster and more ambitiously than national governments; never more so than during the past three years since Paris. Today there are thousands of these leaders showing the way forward, sharing lessons, developing expertise, and building broader confidence that this work can be done and that it brings benefits.
Recognizing this and hoping to accelerate implementation of the Paris Climate Accord, California — one of the globe’s most important sub-national leaders — decided to host a confab for other sub-national leaders in September 2018.
The Global Climate Action Summit (GCAS) in San Francisco was the first global climate meeting blessed by the United Nations for leaders who aren’t presidents and prime ministers.
Instead, it targeted mayors, governors, CEOs, and investors. These leaders have consistently been the source of the boldest and most innovative work on climate: encouraging, nudging, and even guilting national leaders and multilateral negotiators into accelerating commitments to action. By design, GCAS became a magnet for sub-national leaders to make exciting announcements and commitments.
Handing these leaders their own stage for a week was a stroke of genius that propelled forward a tsunami of animated moves in more than 350 affiliated venues in and around San Francisco. These announcements galvanized additional pledges by stoking friendly competition and by building confidence that practical and economically beneficial steps, beta-tested by local leaders and innovators, can be taken by all levels of government to solve the climate crisis.
If you were in San Francisco for Governor Jerry Brown’s GCAS week in early September, you could have heard hundreds of mayors, governors, CEOs, and investors announcing steps they are taking to pull climate change-causing emissions out of their states, cities, companies, buildings, cars, electricity, waste streams, and portfolios, and from forests and oceans. GCAS was the heart of a multi-week catchment period for hundreds of commitments and announcements made before, during, and after the formal summit.
In a series of posts over the next few days, with the benefit of several weeks of hindsight, I will attempt to catalogue the announcements and commitments made around GCAS. First, I’ll look at the major players making these commitments. Next, I’ll describe where the commitments are happening on the sub-national landscape through a sectoral lens. Finally, I’ll consider how current progress can accelerate future work to put the Paris Climate Accord into full effect for 2020 and beyond.
In the post-Paris world, filled with bottom-up and largely voluntary commitment making, we need to find a better way of reporting on everything that is happening. Because there is no compliance requirement, reporting is voluntary and spotty, which makes it difficult to track. It is difficult — impossible, maybe — to piece together the full GCAS story. But even the inadequate accounting in the posts to follow reveals a surprising breadth and depth of climate actions being planned and implemented.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
