Giving Compass' Take:
- Writing for Eco-Business, the Thomson Reuters Foundation highlights how city officials are emphasizing that the poorest people should gain the most from climate action.
- How can you support providing jobs, comfortable homes, affordable clean energy, and equal access to green spaces for all people in your community?
- Read about achieving more effective and equitable climate action.
What is Giving Compass?
We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us.
Efforts to push low-carbon lifestyles and green energy to curb climate change will fail unless many people see benefits — and the poorest and most vulnerable should get the biggest gains, leading mayors and other city officials urged Friday.
“The journey to net-zero (emissions) has to happen with and for our people, not to them,” warned Susan Aitken, leader of the city council in Glasgow, the Scottish city that will host the COP26 UN climate negotiations in November.
“It can’t be about just telling our poorest residents what they have to give up … (It) has to show how to take advantage of this changing world,” she said during an online event marking 100 days until the key talks.
More than a half-century later, Glasgow is still battling social deprivation as a result of the city’s painful industrial decline starting in the 1950s, Aitken said.
That has made clear that as a new major economic shift gets underway to try to ward off surging climate threats, “anything but a just transition we will come to regret”, she said.
Read the full article about climate action that benefits poor people at Eco-Business.