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The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), through its website, states that today more than half of the world's population lives in cities.
A figure that is growing so much and so constantly that it is expected to go from 3,500 to 6,700 million inhabitants by 2050. Furthermore, these cities are already responsible for more than 70% of global carbon dioxide emissions today.
What its inhabitants consume in the form of food, goods and energy affects the Earth, a wounded and pressured planet, as if its resources were inexhaustible.
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The idea is to reach an intermediate point between the demands of urban lifestyles and the ecological capacity of the planet.
A balance that allows us to build a present in which people and nature coexist in harmony.
In this context and since 2013, under the WWF umbrella,
We Love Cities was
born
(we love cities).
A friendly competition that aims to raise awareness of the need to create more sustainable cities through citizen participation, via voting through social networks, connecting it with the competent bodies when making political decisions.
The participating cities do so because they have previously been finalists of the Open Planet City Challenge (OPCC), a challenge launched by WWF, which recognizes and rewards the work on sustainability that some local governments are doing, he explains from Sweden via email email, Barbara Evaeus, Communications Manager for WWF Cities.
The challenge is to reach the goal set in the 2015 Paris Agreement: limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The OPCC guides cities in relation to the most effective actions to achieve this mission successfully.
In this pandemic year of 2020, the
We Love Cities
campaign
ran from mid-September to mid-October.
54 cities from 26 countries participated and more than 1.2 million votes were cast globally.
The winner was the Filipino Batangas.
From this moment, explains Barbara Evaeus, it is up to the competent authority to carry out its strategy against climate change and make sustainability a political action that positively affects the environment and the lives of its residents.
For example, the Batangas city council is installing solar panels in public buildings and uses low-consumption LED lighting for street lighting, in addition to addressing specific climatic vulnerabilities in the area: collection and use of rainwater that it accumulates on the rooftops and improves the food supply network to make Batangas a self-sufficient city in this regard.
Batangas is the winning city of the 54 participants, which does not mean that the rest remain idle.
Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP), three cities in the United Kingdom that are part of the same City Council, to face the climate emergency and make them more sustainable places, have devised a series of projects that bet on the investment of networks of district heating, increase the productivity of renewable electricity and build more infrastructure and electric vehicles to have a transport network that does not generate polluting emissions.
In addition to taking coastal measures to protect themselves from floods caused by global warming.
Los Angeles is the number one city in installation of solar energy systems in the United States
On the other hand, the Norwegian city and municipality of Arendal aims to be completely free of fossil fuels by 2030 and in 2040 it plans to limit carbon emissions to one ton per person.
Meanwhile it boasts of being a green and sustainable destination.
There
has been no shortage of American cities in
We Love Cities
, despite what little the imminent former President Donald Trump has done for the environment and sustainability.
Cleveland, through the Sustainable Cleveland program, plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050 through a series of measures focused on energy efficiency, green buildings, clean energy, sustainable transportation, clean water, green spaces and the promotion of locally produced food.
Los Angeles, by contrast, has focused on solar photovoltaics.
It is the number one city in the installation of solar energy systems in the country.
Park City, the third of the participating US cities, has set a goal for all urban operations to run on 100 percent renewable energy and by 2030 the entire community will do so.
To these plans are added some achievements: the ban (in 2017) of the use of plastic bags in the main grocery stores of the city, having become the first mountain town in the United States to implement a fleet of electric buses of zero emissions, having the first shared electric bike program in the country, a community recycling center supervised by Recycle Utah and more than 3,200 hectares of green space in the city.
Cities face not only purely climate and environmental issues, but also challenges derived from their impact: poverty, housing shortage and waste management, to name three.
Good ecological and sustainable practice has a positive impact on cities and their inhabitants.
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