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Local Environment, Vol. 7, No. 2, 117118, 2002
EDITORIAL
Local Action Moves the World?
This February in Vancouver, at one of the nal local government
meetings priorto the World Summit on Sustainable Development, the
International Council forLocal Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI)
drove home their variant on the thinkglobally, act locally theme:
Local Action Moves the World. This is of coursea core theme of our
journal; one of our fundamental beliefs. Even on globalissues, we
take the local route to their resolution. For instance, in Vol. 3,
No.
3, our Greenhouse Gases Special, our editorial noted that the
actions taken ingreenhouse gas abatement are never really global.
They are, and will continueto be, mostly local, the result of
efforts by local institutions , communities andindividual consumers
(Agyeman et al., 1998). We still believe this, and applaudthe
vision, leadership and resolve of those cities participating in
ICLEIs Citiesfor Climate Protection campaign, but our optimism
about local action movingthe world has suffered a recent blow.
In March, an ice shelf the size of the country of Wales, or the
US state ofRhode Island, collapsed and broke off the Antarctic
continent, shattering into
thousands of icebergs in one of the most dramatic examples yet
of the effects ofclimate change. The shelf, called Larsen B, was
200 metres thick with a surfacearea of 3250 sq km, and, according
to scientists from the British AntarcticSurvey (BAS), was thought
to weigh almost 500 billion tonnes. The nal breakup of the whole
shelf took only 31 days, shocking glaciologists with its sheerscale
and speed.
The collapse is thought to have dumped more ice into the
Southern Oceanthan all of the previous half centurys icebergs
combined. Both the BAS and theUS governments Ice Center consider
this, and the 5500 sq km Iceberg B22,
which broke off from the Thwaites ice tongue into the southern
Amundsen Sea,as rm evidence of climate change.
And what of the political response? The British Minister for the
Environment,Michael Meacher, said the collapse of the Larsen B
shelf was a great cause ofconcern and a wake-up signal to the whole
world. When an ice-shelf of suchenormous proportions can break up,
that shows the effect that we are having.The rapid warming at the
Antarctic Peninsula is broadly consistent with globalwarming but it
is not understood why its rate of warming is so much greater
thanthe global average. The silence among US politicians
immediately following
the 19 March collapse was deafening.The international agreements
from the UN Framework Convention on Climate
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Editorial
decade ago. However, it has been estimated that the UK will need
to secure an80% cut over the next 100 years if global targets for
both GHGs and develop-ment in Southern countries are to be
achieved.
This is no small task, and it is clear that national governments
cannot deliverthis alone. This was the impetus behind the launch of
the Cities for Climate
Protection (CCP) Campaign by ICLEI in 1993. Under the CCP,
nationalcampaigns have been established in the US, Australia,
Canada and Japan, withfurther programmes under development in
Finland, France, Italy, Mexico and thePhilippines, with a new
initiative, CCP-Europe, developing partnerships withinthe European
Union.
Local action can indeed move the world. But we also need global
action aswell. And fast.
JULIAN AGYEMAN & BOB EVANS
Reference
Agyeman, J., Evans, B. & Kates, R.W. (1998) Thinking locally
in science, practice and policy, Greenhouse
Gases Special Issue, Local Environment, 3(3), pp. 245246
