Renting a pair of jeans, working on an abandoned houseboat renovated as an office or living in a portable home made from a shipping container — these are just a few ways residents of the Dutch capital, Amsterdam, can play their part to save the planet.
Three years ago, the city launched a quest to become a “circular economy” — reusing products and materials, and minimizing waste — by 2050.
It now has 73 related projects underway, said Eveline Jonkhoff, a strategic adviser on the initiative.
Illustration: Mountain People
The circular-economy push is part of a wider effort by Amsterdam to help meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement to curb climate change, she told a conference on smart cities in Barcelona, Spain, last week.
Other climate targets for Amsterdam focus on ending the use of natural gas by mid-century and putting in place a clean public transport system that does not contribute to planet-warming emissions by 2025.
However, key to the success of the city’s push toward carbon neutrality is enabling everyone to participate, Jonkhoff said.
“All these changes require very high investments and we need to make sure this transition is affordable for everyone,” she said.
Financial instruments would be needed to help residents buy solar panels and electric cars so they are “not just for the happy few,” she added.
How to make often high-tech measures to limit global warming available and appealing to much of the public — including the elderly and the poor, who are often left out, despite being most vulnerable to climate stresses — has been a key focus of the Barcelona conference.
In Oslo, city authorities are introducing a new congestion charge in rush hours and adding more than 50 new road toll stations in a bid to deter polluting traffic, but “many people experience this as a challenge if they don’t have the money to pay,” said Daniel Rees, political adviser to the Norwegian capital’s deputy mayor.
Shifting to cleaner modes of getting around would require sufficient public transport, safe bicycle lanes and a network of charging points for electric vehicles, and if cities start using autonomous buses in the future, alternative jobs would need to be found for drivers, he said.
Meanwhile, Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau highlighted “climate justice” as one of four pillars of the Catalan city’s climate plan, adopted earlier this year.
The city aims to boost support for the 10th of residents who struggle to pay for energy, and to improve housing to save on energy costs and reduce health risks from extreme weather.
Barcelona — which faces more intense heatwaves, rain storms and droughts — is also doubling its bicycle lanes, adding 1.6m2 of greenery per person by planting trees and creating public gardens, and pedestrianizing some city blocks, among other measures.
Spanish Minister for Ecological Transition Teresa Ribera told the conference that urban policies on climate change can improve citizens’ lives in the form of cleaner air, better-insulated buildings, energy savings and more parks.
“Greener and healthier cities are also safer cities, and more attractive places to live,” she said.
However, Spain’s Socialist-led government, which came to power in June, is also aware that not everyone would win if it steps up action to decarbonize its economy, as it is promising.
Last month, in a push to close most of Spain’s coal mines by the end of this year, Madrid made a deal with unions to invest 250 million euros (US$283 million) over the next five years in affected provinces, mainly in the northwest.
The money is to support environmental restoration, early retirement and training for miners to take up green-energy jobs.
It would be spent under a proposed system of “just transition contracts” between the central government and local authorities that would bring in businesses, universities and others.
In Barcelona, Ribera told journalists that modern society must “pay attention to those groups who feel menaced by the transformation” to a low-carbon economy and should offer solidarity.
“We need to help those regions see a positive, constructive future,” she said on the sidelines of the conference.
In December last year, the EU launched a platform to support 41 regions in 12 nations that employ 185,000 people in coal mining to shift the focus of their economies away from producing the dirty fuel and toward clean energy.
“The just transition concerns us all,” said Elena Visnar Malinovska, head of adaptation in the European Commission’s climate action division. “Countries and cities have to start designing [climate] policies that minimize the economic and social disruptive impacts ... and really maximize the benefits.”
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