Implementing Paris, Sendai, SDG 2015 commitments – COP21

The Compact of Mayors is a huge cooperative effort among mayors and city officials to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, track progress, and prepare for the impacts of climate change. Currently 382 cities, representing 345,853,881 people worldwide and 4.7% of the total global population, have committed to the Compact of Mayors. These cities and others are also gearing up to implement Urban SDG Goal 11 to make their cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. The C40 cities network has shown that a third of decisions that affect global warming outcomes will be made in cities and if we carry on as we are, within 5 years we will have locked in enough carbon to create 2 DegC of global warming. Transformational change in cities is an urgent priority.  

I founded The Ecological Sequestration Trust in 2011 to create the open-source tools that city mayors and officials could use themselves to tackle climate change adaptation and mitigation and create inclusive, resilient sustainable outcomes. Our platform resilience.io phase 1 is being built for testing with the help of Imperial College London, the Institute for Integrated Economic Research, Future Earth Ltd, and Cities Alliance in one of the Compact of Mayors’ Cities, Accra in 2016. Accra is also one of the Rockefeller Foundation 100 Resilient Cities.

We are also working with cities and regions in Mongolia, China and Europe with Future Earth Ltd and other partners.

The Trust is now working with UNISDR, UNSDSN, DFID, Cities Alliance, C40 and 100 Resilient Cities to ensure that resilience.io is built quickly with the following characteristics to support implementation globally:

• A transparent trusted city accounting and decision making platform and framework
• Data specification to support SDG targets, C40/ICLEI Greenhouse Gas Protocol and UNISDR/100 Resilient Cities ‘resilient city indicators’
• Data specification for Insurance catastrophic risk models for disaster risk reduction
• Collaborative use, including public, private and community sectors, with the data and evidence to support financial investment through an Urban Development Investment Fund UDIF into bankable projects by GCF, development banks, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, city bonds, green growth funds etc.

Now that huge commitments have been made in Sendai, Addis Ababa, New York and Paris in 2015 we plan a single platform to help deliver them all in city regions and human settlements in as smart and effective as effective way as possible.