The city councilors participated in the environmental summit within the framework of the Climate Action Partnerships (ACA), a global initiative of WWF that seeks to promote the action of local governments, something that is also established in our country's Framework Law on Climate Change.
A global and complex phenomenon such as Climate Change requires coordinated actions at all levels of government. The Minister of the Environment, Maisa Rojas, explained during COP 28 that "Chile's current Framework Law on Climate Change involves 17 ministries and all the municipalities and regions, which will have to prepare, implement and measure the progress of the climate action plans".
In this sense, the action of municipalities is key to the mitigation and adaptation of climate change, from the particular action of each urban and rural commune in Chile, to their joint action on a national and global scale. For this reason, several Chilean mayors participated in COP 28, within the framework of the Climate Action Partnerships (CPA), a global initiative of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) that seeks to promote the action of local governments.
Mauro Tamayo, Mayor of Cerro Navia, pointed out that although municipalities are usually distant spectators of the COPs, "in this version they have been protagonists. Mayors from different parts of the world have been deployed, participating and influencing, achieving something that is very difficult at the national level: to be faster and more ambitious in facing the challenges of climate change", he said.
For his part, the mayor of Independencia, Gonzalo Durán, added that "the local dimension is probably the most important, because it is in the territories where the effects of climate change are experienced, sometimes dramatically".
The role of municipalities in climate change mitigation
The Framework Law on Climate Change, enacted in Chile in June last year, establishes in its Article 12 a period of three years, until June 2025, for all municipalities to prepare their Communal Action Plans on Climate Change (PACCC). This includes a characterization of vulnerability and impacts in the commune, and concrete mitigation and adaptation measures, establishing responsibilities, deadlines and means of implementation, as well as indicators to verify compliance with these measures.
Gonzalo Durán indicated that "participating in COP 28 is a way of exchanging experiences with local governments from different latitudes and telling what we have been doing in Chile, with a view to giving a more global scale to our work". And he gave several examples of what has been done in his commune, Independencia, where the municipality planted an urban forest with a methodology that accelerates the growth of native species, the entire fleet of municipal vehicles is electric and gray water is treated in educational establishments. "We recover water that in normal conditions we lose in a context of water scarcity, we educate about water care in schools and the recovered water is used for the risk of green areas. Therefore, we also contribute to the quality of life," said the mayor.
Cerro Navia is also making progress in this area. "Every strategy, every plan we make is contributing to each of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals," asserted the mayor of that commune, Mauro Tamayo. "It is something innovative, something that no municipality has ever done," he said. He highlighted other actions such as the creation of the first public food bank in Chile: "only in 2022 we managed to deliver 200 tons of food, and last week we just knew our carbon footprint, to develop a mitigation plan. Also, we have already planted more than half of the ten thousand new trees in Cerro Navia", he concluded.
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