Sadiq Khan made the fight againstpollution urban atmosphere and climate change the main theme of his six years since mayor of London. The city's first Muslim mayor, the 51-year-old former Labor MP, was elected president of the C40 Cities group last year, which brings together the world's major cities and places climate change at the top of its political agenda.
Greatly frustrated by the slow progress made at UN-sponsored climate summits, Khan defines city mayors as “theperformers” of climate change, in contrast to the “procrastinatorsof national governments and says cities must be given a new leadership role at future climate summits.
Khan puts the world's largest program for reducing vehicle emissions in cities on the scales and promises to deliver more radical reforms on this issue if he is re-elected in 2024 as mayor of London.
Interview with Sadiq Khan
As chair of the C40 group, which brings together 97 major cities, she often urges cities to share their best practices in tackling climate change. Can you give us some significant examples of this effort?
“The great mayor of Warsaw, Rafal Trzaskowski, is doing a great job of retrofitting buildings to improve their energy efficiency. Freetown, Sierra Leone, is doing a great job of planting trees that help reduce landslides and improve air quality. New York and Tokyo have adopted impressive standards for buildings, reducing their energy emissions and Oslo has introduced carbon budgets for the city. London has launched the world's first Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), which imposes a tax on vehicles that do not meet ecological standards. Within two years we have halved the toxicity of the air in the city center”.
Is there a specific program that you would like to adopt in London compared to one you have seen working elsewhere?
“I am very impressed with what the mayor of Oslo, Raymond Johansen, is doing with carbon budgets. We are planning to start including a carbon budget ourselves when we draw up the next budget in London, so that we can see the carbon impact of every pound we spend. There are examples all over the world that lead to tangible results, because cities are active in the fight against climate change, while national governments are often lagging behind”.
In what sense?
"It's very simple. Most countries that have set goals to go carbon neutral have set a 20-30 year agenda, when those political leaders are gone. The mayors have set short-term goals and are already doing something. Of all the more than 200 countries that have signed the Paris Agreement, how many have a transformation plan that actually complies with the agreement? Only one, the Gambia. For big cities it is different. Of the 97 C40 members, 64 have a transformation plan to go carbon neutral in accordance with Paris. This is the distinction between those who do and those who procrastinate”.
What are the immediately achievable results for reducing CO2 emissions in large cities?
“There are three broad areas where carbon emissions are produced: where people work, where they live and how they travel. If we can reduce emissions in these areas – for example by walking more, cycling more, using public transport more and less vehicles – we rapidly reduce carbon emissions and other forms of pollution. Insulating our buildings with double glazing and so on to make them more energy efficient and using electric or hydrogen vehicles are other concretely possible examples. These are things we can do easily and there are cities that are already doing it seriously”.
What are the biggest long-term challenges?
“The most difficult – but not insurmountable – is the transition from hydrocarbons to renewable energies. We have to invest. It is often seen as a lost investment, but the money is paid back in terms of reduced fuel bills and new jobs."
You are now consulting to expand the very low emission zone of London to cover a much larger area of the city, but do you think you will eventually have to go further?
“Yes we have to over. I believe that the next step is intelligent road traffic pricing, i.e. the regulation of road traffic charges using smart technologies. Congestion charging and London's ULEZ were the first of their kind when they were introduced in 2003 and 2017, but they're pretty gross. They have led to great improvements in air quality, but are based solely on the principle of a vehicle entering a geographical area. It would be better to have a tailor-made system that takes into account the economic and social profiles of the users and the actual state of the vehicles and areas. For example, you should pay less in areas with bad public transport and few alternatives to driving, or when congestion is minimal or your car has low pollution parameters. Income will also be taken into consideration in determining the rate. It is on this set of measures that we are working and will work in the future”.
At what point are you?
“I hope to do that in my next term if I am re-elected in 2024. If that happens we are going to expand the ULEZ to the whole of Greater London and in the next term, 2024 to 2028, I hope we can achieve smart pricing for road users . We have to be ambitious because we want to go carbon neutral by 2030”.
Britain has a national target of achieving zero carbon emissions by 2050, yet you set London a target of 2018 in 2030. Are you sure you can meet the 2030 deadline?
“You have to be ambitious, so I think we can do it but, to be honest, we won't do it without more support from the national government and the devolution of powers and resources. Of the three areas I have mentioned, transport, homes and workplaces, we only have the powers to handle most transport, I have no real powers over buildings, neither homes nor workplaces. I have no powers over the River Thames, for example, so boats go up and down it using diesel right in the middle of the city and I have no powers to get them to be more environmentally friendly. If the government gave me the resources for a scrappage program to encourage families who own diesel or petrol vehicles to abandon them, or the resources to give small businesses and charities a subsidy to abandon polluting vehicles, all of this would make a big difference. The private sector is very keen to go carbon neutral and businesses from all over the world are coming to London thanks to our green programme, but we need government support on infrastructure to make our buses electric and to have a sufficient number of charging points for electric vehicles. And if the government doesn't invest in upgrading our buildings, we will never get there”.
She believes that national governments lost the challenge in the climate talks at the United Nations Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP) in Glasgow last year. What do cities want to happen at this year's talks in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt?
“In Glasgow there has been a real clash between the energy and innovation of the private sector, cities and mayors and the stonewalling, sway and delays within most national governments, in particularly those of the globalized North. What we need in the next meetings is for the United Nations and national governments to let go of the powers they hold and bring in others who can give them the support they need. I think we can go carbon neutral by 2030 and easily stay below 1,5 degrees warming if city mayors and citizens are given a greater say in future COPs, so that they are not just chatter . One of the most important things we need to make people understand is that the problem we have is actually an opportunity. The famous phrase is that you should never waste a crisis. And the pandemic pales as a crisis compared to that of climate change. If the world can unite to tackle Covid, why can't we unite to solve a much bigger crisis, climate change"?
From: London's Mayor to UN: Make Way for the 'Doers', “The New York Times”, June 29, 2022
