 Good afternoon. On behalf of the Ford School of Public Policy, it is my pleasure to welcome you to our seventh webinar event for the North American Colloquium on Climate Policy Series. Thanks also to the International Policy Center for your collaboration. The North American Colloquium is an ongoing collaboration between the Ford School, the University of Toronto's Monk School and the Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. I would also like to acknowledge the generous support of the Meany Family Foundation for making this year's programming possible. Today's event focuses on what some of the largest North American cities are doing in response to climate change. First we'll hear from Sarah Hughes, who will discuss research from her book Repowering Cities. Then we'll hear from Giancarlo Delgado Ramos, who with co-author Hilda Blanco will discuss their comparative case study of urban water infrastructure in Mexico City and Los Angeles. As audience members, you may ask a question in writing using the Q&A feature on your Zoom control panel. We'll get to as many of your questions as possible, but apologies if we cannot get to all of them. We may go about 15 minutes beyond the scheduled end time of 2pm Eastern time to accommodate as many of your questions as possible. At this time, it's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Sarah Hughes. Sarah Hughes is an assistant professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability right here at the University of Michigan. She directs the Water and Climate Policy Lab. Her research focuses on urban climate change and water policy, politics, and governance. Her book Repowering Cities critically evaluates the governing strategies to meet ambitious GHG reduction targets and the consequences of these efforts. And before I turn it over to Sarah, I should also mention she has the distinction of being connected with two of the three NAC partner universities having been an assistant professor at the University of Toronto prior to her arrival here in Ann Arbor. So Sarah, it's all yours. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for the invitation to present on this work and be part of this conversation. It's very exciting. And I wish I could see all my colleagues, but another time and another format. So let me pull up my slides here. So as Josh said, we're focusing on urban climate governance in North America. And in my talk today, I'm going to, I'm going to focus in on one specific dimension of this or this idea of implementation through collaboration and coalition. So implementing some of these ambitious climate goals at the urban scale and what that looks like from a governance perspective. So, I think it's pretty easy to point to a lot of examples of urban leadership on climate policy in North America. In a lot of ways. Cities have been leading on climate policy or at least engaging in climate policy since there was such a thing as climate policy. So the very first international meetings on the climate and the climate challenge took place in Toronto in 1988, the World Conference on the changing atmosphere. Leading up to that meeting Toronto set a greenhouse gas emission reduction target for itself. Cities like Seattle and Portland followed suit quickly after. So many examples I could give I'll give just a few here of some of what some of this leadership has looked like in the in the years following. We've got former mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg who led what's been called one of the more ambitious climate urban climate change plans plan YC, and now serves as a special envoy to the United Nations on climate action and ambition. Mexico City held meeting of mayors ahead of the cop and cancun that led to the Mexico City packed an agreement among global mayors to to track greenhouse gas emissions adopt ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets. Today we've got almost 150 cities in the US that have committed to 100% renewable energy hundreds of cities signed the we're still in packed or or or agreement after President Trump former President Trump announced his plans to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. So we've got a lot of examples for kind of local leadership on climate policy, a lot of ambition, a lot of goals that have targets that have been set ahead of and sometimes in spite of any action at the state or federal levels. So there's been a lot written about why that might be the case, you know whether cities are trying to capture some of the co benefits of reducing climate or reducing greenhouse gas emissions. You know the political benefits of this kind of leadership, you know, either political benefits, thinking upward, you know in terms of affecting policy at other levels or simply in terms of reelection prospects. In reality, once you once the ink has dried on these on these targets and on these goals, the cities face the real challenge of having to implement policies that will really transition them into cities that use, you know, are producing significantly less greenhouse gas emissions and once we start to unpack what that looks like from a policy and governance perspective. So we can start to understand, you know, the real challenge that cities face once you know kind of moving from policy to implementation so urban emissions come from four primary sectors are kind of four primary sources sort of where energy is generated and how energy is generated, what an energy demand looks like in terms of building energy use in cities. The transportation systems that move people around in cities, and to a lesser degree waste management systems in cities as well. So when we start thinking about what it means to actually, you know, meet some of these goals and actually reduce emissions, it requires really getting into an unpacking the specific policy sectors within cities. And as Josh mentioned, that question or this question of you know what it looks like to then start engaging really ambitiously and in new ways in these policy sectors was the question that led me to take up this book project that is now out in the world of powering cities, but really I wanted to know how does cities go from, you know, setting these ambitious policies to actually trying to meet to meet their goals. You know, at the time it felt like we were spending too much time padding cities on the back for their leadership and not enough time, trying to make sense of what it all, what it all added up to. So in studies, urban governance and policymaking, I found that to be particularly interesting as well so you know what does it look like to go from City A to City B. You know what are the policymaking processes and strategies that that are involved. As we said, as someone who studies cities and urban governance, I came out this question, kind of wanting to take a step back and think about, okay, well how do cities govern you know what what do we know about urban governance and how that works generally in ways that could inform our understanding of urban climate policy, more specifically. In urban governance literature and theory, our basic assumption going into it is that city governments have incomplete authority and limited capacities. And this is an assumption we generally start from regardless of the national context we're working in, whether it's, you know, cities in the US where we might generally think that we might generally think enjoy more formal authority than in other places, or you know cities in Canada where we typically think of cities as having relatively less formal authority. In both contexts our assumption is that that authority is incomplete and capacities are not are also limited. And that by necessity then urban governance takes place through collaboration and coalition building. And this is a quote I love from a kind of grandfather of urban governance that really are at the heart of urban governance is that the task of crafting arrangements through which resources can be mobilized, thus enabling a community to make difficult and non routine goals and I think you know the idea of transitioning to a carbon neutral city, or to completely revamping the way that people move throughout a metropolis could be fairly called a difficult or non routine goal. So we're starting out from the premise with a premise that you know that this this kind of mobilization collaboration and coalition building is going to be at the heart of what what this governance looks like. So then from this we can think then that or assume the climate policy implementation strategies and successes will be a product of the coalitions and collaborations that are formed that are possible that are feasible that are realized that are understanding of that of both implementation strategies and their outcomes will have something to do with with this coalition building and collaboration making. Next way I think this is where in some ways we can bring back that national context in that it's helping to shape the opportunities and formations for coalition building, rather than necessarily thinking about them just as determining formal authorities. So in this book, I explore some of these ideas in three specific North American cities New York City, Los Angeles and Toronto, and these were really exciting cases for me because they were all three fairly early actors in terms of setting their goals for the future and relatively ambitious greenhouse gas emissions targets for themselves so they had all put out these big plans in 2007 with with relatively similar targets for reducing their cities emissions and so the advantage here being that they allowed that it was reasonable to start asking questions about implementation, you know cities that have gotten a more recent start. You know we might not have the same expectations but these are cities where we should expect to be seeing some action and be expected to be able to say something about the implementation process. In terms of you know their emissions profiles and what they look like from greenhouse gas emissions perspective. In terms of emissions intensities all three cities are kind of middle of the pack let's say in terms of you know these global city profiles. You know they're they're in that same as a kind of seven to 10 tons per capita range. But they have different profiles when you, you know, when you break it down by sector. So in New York City, for example, public transit and walking, you know, active transit are much more prevalent so building energy use plays a larger role in the city's greenhouse gas emissions profile, where in Los Angeles and Toronto transportation systems are more reliant on on cars single passenger vehicles even so the transportation networks there make up a larger portion of the emissions profiles. So there are also some really interesting and in some ways they'd be unexpected differences in terms of what authorities the cities do have to to tackle their emissions. And this is where I think some of the interesting variation comes out in thinking about, you know, where those limitations are in terms of both institutions and capacities, and that they're, they can look very different and very different cities. And maybe not always in the ways we would expect so New York City, for example, it's one of the strongest city governments, maybe in the world it has a very strong mayor system. And was was fairly committed had a moderately progressive state to back it up. But but it's jurisdiction specific to its energy system and transportation system is fairly limited. So while overall we think of it as a strong city government specifically related to his energy network and transportation network, the authorities quite limited. Whereas in Los Angeles we have what's typically considered a weak mayor city government. And in a very, but a very progressive state. The advantage Los Angeles has is it has an entirely city owned energy utility so it's got it owns the largest energy utility. I think in North America, for sure in the US. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is this huge municipally owned energy utility that the city has, you know, full full access and full power over in Toronto. Again, we've got what's considered a pretty pretty weak city government. In terms of its authority generally, but one advantage is that it has is it has a city run transit system or it plays a large role in its in its transit system through the TTC. And when we look at what the cities are actually doing in terms of the policies they're putting in place the strategies they're working on to reduce their emissions. And then taking advantage of these particular opportunities so we see them tailoring their strategies both to their emissions profiles and to their kind of formal levers of power so New York City is putting a lot of energy. No pun intended a lot of effort into improving energy efficiency in its building stock right we saw that big bar for you know the role that building energy uses playing. So in terms of a place the city has a lot of authority. They did some kind of early experiments with transportation emissions I don't know if anyone had ever followed Bloomberg's failed attempt to implement congestion pricing, but they ran up to the limits of their authority on transportation, very early on Los Angeles, you know they're taking full advantage of their utility providing a lot of both large and small scale solar directly through the LADWP. They were also successful in securing new funding for public transit which I'll talk about again in a little bit. And Toronto has been really creative about using the levers that it does have to make it easier for other actors to take the steps needed to reduce emissions, and engaging directly in in in systems where they can things like though their waste recovery programs and things like this. So I want to talk about. So in this slide right I'm kind of talking about the what the cities are doing you know what did they do what programs that they have no what policies were they were they doing where they were they trying to put into place. And I think what we want to know really when it comes to these governance questions and these implementation questions is how did these come about you know what were the strategies underlying these policies that led them to be, you know how how did we get new funding for transportation I think a lot of cities would like to know the answer to that right. So that's that's really where I was have been trying to have been trying to push on is think about. What cities are doing but the strategy political strategies and policy making strategies that allowed them to take these steps. So I'll give some of my favorite examples from each of the cities. I'm trying to keep an eye on my time as well here. In New York City, my favorite example of this is kind of governing through collaboration and coalition building is the is the green codes task force and so this was a task force the city put together of real estate stakeholders you know building engineers, as well as people from the environmental groups and kind of gave them the task of identifying all the different ways the city's building code could be updated to reduce emissions. And even though the city itself had the authority to just do it you know they they they write their own building codes. They specifically use this task force model in order to know first of all access the expertise they needed, but also to make sure that they had buy in from these stakeholders for all the changes that would be coming down the pike, and to ensure implementation ensure once things were put in place that you know that they were actually going to become part of the city's building stock. So it was a very successful process, it led to the passage of more than 100 what were called green bills that updated the city's building code. And the legislative analyst I interviewed called it one of the most collaborative processes I've ever been a part of. And so it really also set the stage where, you know, the city New York City replicated this task force model across a number of its climate initiatives, and it's also been exported to other cities as a kind of good, good model for for for doing the work necessary to, like I said access the expertise generated buy in and ensure implementation. My favorite example from Los Angeles was this effort to get more transit funding for the city so of course Los Angeles is notorious for its traffic congestion. It's reliance on cars. It's kind of poultry public transit system. And so there had been efforts previous to this to raise new revenue for public transit funding, but 2008 was the first time it was, it was successful so the goal was to increase sales tax by half of a percent to dedicate to transportation projects. It passed by referendum so required this public referendum to go into place. It passed by referendum by point four percent, really the thinnest of margins. It was successful, but the reason it worked this time around was in part, you know I don't want to give all the credit but in part you know the mayor, the LA mayor at the time via I go so I really worked hard to champion the effort to build a coalition of environmental neighborhoods and neighborhood. Neighbor commerce real estate neighborhood organizations really anyone who stood to benefit from transit really got out there and, you know made the case and and got the support needed to, to get this past. similar effort both before and since was not successful, but in this case the potentially worked and the city was able to, county actually was able to get this funding in place. The other piece of this was that, it takes a long time for a half percent sales tax to accumulate into enough to, for big spending on infrastructure projects. So at the time VRA goes to also lobbied Congress to pass what's called the moving America faster bill. And what this did is it allowed the federal government to lend out the capital needed for these projects with the idea that it's been repaid once the funding does accrue from these new funding sources. So really did kind of working in multiple directions to get this funding in place. And the projects are being built. And then my favorite example from Toronto is this tower wise project. And so like I said, Toronto has been really creative about thinking about ways they can help facilitate the kind of action other people need to take because their authorities are relatively limited. But this is a really neat project. It's a collaboration between the Toronto Community Housing Corporation that's in charge of social low income housing in the city, the Toronto Atmospheric Fund who plays a large role in the greenhouse gas emissions projects and the Federation of Canadian municipalities. And so they work together to get the funds aligned and get the partnerships aligned. They developed an energy performance standard revolving fund. And so what this does is it provided a way for building retrofits to be deep, deep building retrofits in these social housing buildings to be performed upfront and repaid by the subsequent energy and water savings down the road. So they developed both the fund and the kind of tracking and monitoring system necessary to make the payback system possible. So they ultimately completed deep retrofits on seven of these buildings and are currently kind of scaling out the experience into other provinces. So just to wrap up a little bit, I mean, this is a kind of high love tour of some of my favorite highlights of urban climate governance in these cases. I wanted to just say a couple of things about where we go from here, kind of what I see as some of the interesting questions going forward. So in my work, I've seen that these cities, I think it's fair to say that they're largely on track at the moment. They've seen between 20 and 30% greenhouse gas emissions reductions at this point. But I think they're all kind of facing this challenge now of scaling up. How do we kind of go to the next level if we're gonna, in order to stay on track for the next 10 years kind of thing. Some of the strategies underway are expanding the coalition partners that cities are working with. They're starting to look, I think more actively now for support from higher levels of government to help with that scaling and new sources of funding, trying out some pilot projects and experimentation to help develop that proof of principle. I think one important way, a lot of this is manifesting right now is in this sort of next generation of climate planning that's taking place in each of these cities. And I think in a lot of cities is a reorienting of these climate plans around issues of environmental justice, social sustainability, racial equity, both LA and New York City have rebranded their climate plans as the Green New Deal for their cities. And Toronto's made a similar move with their planning. But I think this is where urban climate governance is headed at the moment, is engaging more significantly with broader issues of equity and justice in the cities. And so I think there'll be some interesting dynamics to track and engage with as cities work to build novel coalitions across environmental and kind of social equity focused groups and issues in policymaking and agencies within the cities even. So I think there's gonna be a lot happening there. Even I saw recently, there's a new paper, Harriet Bulkley just put out where she's even referring to this potentially as the third wave of climate urbanism, seeing some of these same dynamics emerge globally where there's just more and more linking being done between climate and justice issues in the city. The second kind of big question or issue I would put forward, and we talk a lot, I think in the urban climate governance space about inner city learning. We've got a lot of inner city networks, we've got the ICLEI, we've got C40, talk a lot about learning that takes place in those networks. And one thing I've been trying to advocate for is that this learning not only focus on the what, on those specific projects and policies, but the how, you know, what were the strategies that worked? How did you build the coalitions that you needed to get this through? What did the politics look like for you and what worked in finding ways for that kind of learning to take place as well? I'll leave it there, I'll look forward to the discussion. Great, thank you so much, Sarah. That was very, very interesting to get that kind of look at the city level in all three cities. So, in a moment I'm gonna introduce our next presenter, Giancarlo Delgado Ramos. But before I do, I just wanna mention that unfortunately due to some technical difficulties as happens in the COVID era, due to some computer problems, his co-author Hilda Blanco from the University of Southern California was not able to join. They had originally planned to split the presentation with Gian speaking mostly about Mexico City and Hilda speaking mostly about Los Angeles. But Gian's gonna do his best, but just a warning that the Los Angeles side might not be in as much detail. Both of them will be available by email if you have questions about Los Angeles. So at this point I will introduce Giancarlo Delgado Ramos. He is an economist with a background in ecological economics, environmental management and environmental science. He's a full-time researcher at UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, which of course is our Mexican partner for the North American colloquium. He has published three dozen academic books, more than 50 book chapters and more than 200 articles, extremely productive scholar. He was a lead author of the fifth assessment review of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and is currently involved with the IPCC's sixth assessment report. And he's gonna talk about urban water infrastructure in the two cities. Gian, please unmute. Yeah. Thank you, Joshua. Thank you very for the invitation and Sarah, it's nice to share this conversation with you. I'm gonna launch first the presentation. And before I do start, I wanted to make a brief comment on the narrative from Sarah because it was very interesting to see what is going on in a Canadian and North American cities. And a lot of the challenges that were presented are shared with, at least with the mega city and the big cities of Mexico, but there are certain aspects that are different that are very interesting as well. And this convergence of a percentage of a greenhouse gas emission reductions commitments are not the same in our cities. Our cities are more about a number of tons rather than percentage. So when we make the maths, the commitments are not that strong. We will see what happens in the case of Mexico City that is preparing its new climate change program that it should be known publicly very soon. So I just wanted to say that because even though that we share a lot of the same difficulties, a lot of the challenges, the context that is diverse between Canada and United States and Mexico makes more appealing the discussion. Perhaps for us scaling up the politicians, it's important, but before that we need to build and develop local capacities at all levels, not only at the institutional level. Anyway, so I'm just gonna go directly into our presentation for the case of the water and climate change. And the first thing that I want to say kind of an introduction of the topic is that usually cities are dependent of not just their own basin, but different basings, either for taking fresh water or to discharge wastewater. So this connection of different basins to cover the demand of and securing water for cities is very important because then planning is related more to a basin level planning rather than local or just local planning. Of course with urban expansion and the expansion of infrastructure for either channeling water flows, inflows and outflows of water into the city. This idea of the basic sanitary city that the spell constantly water demands and spells constantly water has resulted in a lot of problems. Water resources have been lost. There is a depletion of water resources. There is an intense consumption of energy that's very important for our case studies, particularly Mexico. And this increasing sprawling of cities is increasing financial costs for of course, expanding the system but also for operating the system. And there's a lot of struggles contesting processes that are happening in our cities either because water depletion, water appropriation, that's the case of Mexico, a third of the water. We will see that, but a third of the water that is consumed in Mexico City is imported and that water is taken from indigenous communities. So there are struggles related to that. There are struggles related to a water price, water tariffs and there is also conflicts in relation to the use or the right of using wastewater that's very peculiar for the case of Mexico City. And this context makes that the resolution of the UN General Assembly takes a lot of importance in terms of the need of securing the right, the human right to water and sanitation in a context that that human rights it's being compromised. So ecological crisis over exploitation of water resources are a compromising as a availability and quality of fresh water. And that impacts the quality of public services on water. And in addition to the climate change will have an impact on water availability but also in terms of water risk reliability. So there's a lot of things happening at the same time and the challenge in relation to water, urban water is huge. It's not only about building tubes and offering water to the residents but it's covers a lot of other issues. So in relation to this climate impact to fresh water resources, there is a publication by the IPCC from 2008 that kind of make a balance of the key current vulnerabilities in relation to fresh water resources and the future climate change impacts related also to fresh water. And we can see that we share at least a part of the United States and Mexico and perhaps just a bit of the south of Canada. We share a polarities and impacts and certainly we share between Los Angeles and the north and center of part of Mexico. So addressing urban water security in this changing context requires to consider local hydroclimate variables and existing interactions with couple human water systems. So this is pretty much what we try to address in this chapter that we published a couple of two, three years ago that I grow with Ilda Blanco and we tried to find out the similarities and how we can learn from one case and the other in order to move towards a climate ready water systems not to say water infrastructure only. So I'm just gonna start with the case of Mexico City that's the one that I know best. And in order to contextualize the cases study I wanted to first talk about the implications of urban expansion in Mexico. We are already a country that is highly urbanized about 78% of the population lives in some of the more than 350 cities that have been legally recognized in Mexico that the parameters to define what is urban and rural changes country to country but in the case of Mexico we are near the 400 cities and the expectation is that the population is going to increase all the way to 90%. These will mean different challenges on one hand that the mega city of Mexico City will high Ilda, the mega city of our country, Mexico City will lose weight in terms of total urban population. Big cities as Guadalajara, Monterey that are between one to five million inhabitants right now but they will be between five to 10 million in the well until the middle of the century will gather more weight but mostly a small mid-sized cities are going to be increasingly relevant in the country. So that's one of the first phenomena that we're going to experience. The second one is that in relation to that expansion of urban population we're gonna see a physical expansion of cities. You can see in both of the, well in the graphic that it's on the left you can see how this projection of different size of cities and population and built environment areas going to increase by 2050. And of course that expansion is related to increase of consumption of materials and energy. In this case we made the calculations for a current report that we are prepared for UNEP on the weight of cities in Latin America and the Caribbean. And for the case of Mexico, the DMC does the domestic material consumption that includes a locally produced material and energy that it's consumed in the country plus the importations. So that consumption is going to increase. We present three different scenarios in the graphic. I don't have the time to explain those but are related to the same parameters of material consumption that we have nowadays and we just made the projection with population and then we model changes in the parameters of per capita consumption of materials in the future. So this is the context in which we are and this in relation to water, it will mean that the water footprint of cities is going to increase and we are already in a context of it's not that bad the general water footprint in national terms but when we go to at the local level or specific areas of the country then we are already experiencing huge problems. And as you can see in the map on the right, a lot of the basins already present deficits and we have a lot of problems in Mexico city as well. Right now we are under stress of water because it hasn't rained a drop of water in the last month. So we are at 25% of capacity so that will mean that the availability of water is compromised for the following months. And when we go specifically to the Mexico city case just to let you know what I'm talking about, as you know, Mexico cities in the center of the country in the lower map on your left, you will see the basins that are strongly related to the water service in Mexico city. And if you can see the map on the top, that you can get to see how these basins are related. The map below presents the Mexico Valley basin and the relationship with the Tula basin and the Panacru River that those are the main sources of water. But then we import it from the Kutsa Mala basin and the Lerma basin 30% of the water that we consume. So it's a very complex system that imports a lot of water. They need to pump water one kilometer up to Mexico city and then we spell all the wastewater that is combined with rainwater in the same system to the Tula basin. But the case study, I mean, this is like the basing approach of the case study but the administrative, just to put it like that, the administrative delimitation of the case, it's related to Mexican Valley metropolitan area. So that's the 76 local governments. And of course now you can think about the huge challenge that we are facing in terms of coordination and collaboration as Sarah also explained for the case of other cities. So when we grow this chapter, we analyze the inflows and outflows of water and the level of circularity of the system in both cities in Los Angeles and in Mexico city. In this case, understanding Mexico city as the Mexican Valley metropolitan area. Just to clarify that Mexico city, legally speaking, it relates only to these 16 municipalities that compose a pretty much what we can call the central city. So what we have here is, I'm just gonna go very quick with the data. We have a certain amounts of inflows of water that come from rain. A third of the amount of water, as I say, it comes from two neighboring basings and most of the water comes from the aquifer of our own basin, the Mexico Valley basin. And we import a lot of water that it's bottled. And this is a peculiar case because currently, we were not on the first rank, but now we're in the first place of consumption of bottled water worldwide. And this is new, we learned this this year, we were in the top three, top five places in the previous years. So we estimated that, and we also estimated the different uses of water by industry, by agriculture. We have an important part of the territory or still has agricultural activities and of course more the urban uses of water, meaning residential commerce and government. And the difficulty of the case is that there are two entities that manage the system, the SAGMEX that is related to Mexico City, the 16 Central Municipalities and the CAEM that it's the authority in charge of water in the state of Mexico. So these two authorities operate independently. We're talking about two different states with different political parties in charge. So these features add to the complexity of being able to successfully collaborate and coordinate efforts. So the system is pretty much composed by 600 wells providing about 75% of all water inflows. There is a huge deficit in the aquifer of the city of about 28 cubic meters per second. I say we import a lot of water from the Lerma-Cutsamala system. And just to have you and have an idea of the amount of water that we import. I'm talking about bottled water. It amounts about two hectometers of cubic hectometers per year. And these waters consumed by three fourths of a population. So most of the population consumes bottled water. And the carbon footprint, just talking about the water nexus, energy water carbon nexus in the case of Mexico Valley metropolitan area, we estimated the carbon footprint related to the system. And one of the things that we're very interesting is that the carbon footprint associated to the operation of the full system, it's pretty much the same as the carbon footprint associated to the level of consumption of bottled water. That's very interesting. And it can show us why it's very important, not only in terms of the polymers or the plastic waste that we generate, but also in terms of climate actions that we can take by reducing the consumption of bottled water. We also estimated the emissions of the wastewater that we generate. City treats just a very, very low percentage of the total flow of wastewater. And the peculiar thing of wastewater in Mexico, Mexico City is that this flow has been used by agricultural activities. And this is a dispute that is a peculiar dispute by producers, local producers, that feel that they will not be able to access to this wastewater in order to produce food and flowers because a huge project for installing a water treatment plant, one of the biggest one in Latin America has been proposed and the treatment plant has been already put in place an emotion and the dispute was related to the access because they felt that the water treatment was taking all the water that in the first place was a health issue and the problem of the local population, they figure out a way of living with wastewater and now they are being excluded from this water stream. So it's kind of peculiar and they were manifestations, popular manifestations associated to that. So, and lastly, climate change is compromised Mexico City water security as said, we are currently having problems, but this is constantly the stress of water availability is becoming a more recurrent, rains are, the rain period is becoming shorter and water and the precipitation is becoming higher. So we are experiencing a lot of problems in relation to flooding. Just to give you an idea of the context in which this water system operates, it's a highly uneven metropolitan area. As you can see the central city presents lower poverty percentage of people and the higher poverty is related to the peripheral area of the metropolitan area. And we did in 2019 an evaluation of local capacities and it was very interesting. I will not go into the details, but I just want to point out first of all that in general, we have insufficient or very limited capacities for facing climate environmental issues at the local level. It's not only about water, it includes everything. There's a lack of coordination among the different local governments that we could verify by having interviews with different authorities from the different local governments. And one of the interesting things is that the degree of vulnerability, climate vulnerability recognized by state governments and the national government do not correspond to the existing local climate environmental capacities. So there is a huge mismatch between local capacity, local capacity building and climate vulnerability that if this continue will be very relevant in the future. So for the case of Mexico city, the different challenges and opportunities I'm just going to point out a few of them are related to the need of coordinating urban water governance, including planning infrastructure development and operation with land use planning. That's something that in the chapter that I went through for both cases. We need to protect the ecosystem at the basing scale. We're having a lot of problems with ecological services in the metropolitan area. Even in the central city, we are loosing the capacity of this ecosystem not only to gather water, but also of capturing carbon. We need to make more efficient the system in terms of water energy carbon nexus. We have a huge problem in terms of leakages about 40% of total water inflows are lost through leakages. And the circularity that we present is very, very limited. We also need to span the water system as the city keeps growing. And we need also to take in parallel a lot of measures to stop urban sprawling and it promotes certain density and what UNEP is now calling the strategic intensification within the city. And we have a huge challenge in terms of the amount of money we need to invest. Only for the following decade, we need about 7,000 million pesos. And in addition to that, we need to improve the collection of water rates about 88% of real users in the case of Mexico City are paying their water service, but only 65% has water meters installed. So that's a huge challenge ahead. And finally, we need to promote other technologies such as rainwater harvesting systems, particularly in areas with high hydrological poverty. And this is a program that the current government is promoting. As you can see in the map, without those systems, the hydrological poverty, it's higher. That's the map on your left. And then with the systems that poverty can be considerably reduced. Then these are about 12,000 systems that have been already installed in two different parts of two different municipalities within Mexico City. And this program is still is going on. So they're trying to promote this type of decentralized systems to address hydrological poverty. And just to finalize, we need to also implement different strategies to reduce climate vulnerability of the city. And as you can see, a huge part of Mexico City, the central city, it's vulnerable to flood. So I now leave the floor to Hilda for the Los Angeles case. Thank you so much, Gian. Unfortunately, we're very, very low on time. So Hilda, maybe you could just say a few words of summary on the Los Angeles case. And then there'll be, we're so glad you're here. So you can participate in the Q&A too. Okay, thank you. Yes, if you can advance the slides to the end of my slides on LA. Next one. Next. Okay. Basically the city of Los Angeles is facing a very momentous problem in that a very large percentage of its water comes from the snowpack from the Sierra Nevada, both through the state water project that comes to us from the North and also from the LA aqueducts that the city invested in beginning in the 1910s. And so the majority of our water, let's see about, what do you with? About 85% or so comes from imported water sources. And these water sources of course will be impacted by climate change. As a matter of fact, if you go back to the, I think it was the last slide, you will see that the state, the fourth state's climate assessment pretty much concludes that we will be losing about two thirds of the sources of water that we have been relying upon because of the falling snowpack. And so both the city and the surrounding cities in Southern California will be faced with a problem. And probably by mid-century, the latest. The other major problem is that financing the replacement of failing infrastructure. And I had a very nice slide of all the water pipe break-ins and the age of the pipes, a good portion of them are now forgetting, but more than 50% are 50, 75 years old. And so we have leakages all the time and so on. But the problem is that with the tax limitation movement that California started, Prop 13, it's very difficult for local governments to raise taxes, to replace some of this infrastructure. And hopefully President Biden's new investment plan will help us on that. The state has recognized water as a human right. It was the first state in the country in 2012. And this became important because when we had the big drought that ended in 2016, we found that there were many disadvantaged communities that had very poor water supply sources. And so the state has committed to invest in those agencies. And the other interesting thing about the state of California and in particular the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is that we have started a more holistic approach to water resources management. And this is what it's called the One Water Project. And what's interesting is that it was started in the sanitation department because the LA water system is managed by a very special agency within the city. And so the idea behind the One Water Project is that we have to become more systems-oriented, more holistic in the way that we plan water supply, water wastewater, as well as storm water, especially as we will have to rely more and more on recycled water. And so this is an approach that started out of the sanitation department in the city, but that has been pretty much accepted by the leading agencies, national water agencies, associations across the country. And I think that's all the time I have. Yes, but that was great on the fly, despite all of the technical difficulties that you were able to just skip to the key takeaways. So at this point, we are going to switch to Q&A. We understand some folks may have to leave us, but we have about 15 more minutes for a conversation. And we have some great questions in the Q&A. I'd like to have Professor Barry Rabe, who is the Ford School Coordinator of this year's NAC on Climate, ask the first question, and then we'll do one or two from the audience. Barry? Sure. Thank you, Josh. Thanks to our panelists. Thank you so much. This is just a really fascinating conversation. Thanks for enriching this for us. One of the questions I just wanted to pose, and I'll try to answer, given the fact that there are other good questions waiting, is there was a lot of hope about a decade ago that we might see a lot of formal governance collaboration between American states, Mexican states and Canadian provinces and all kinds of climate policy to a large extent that has not really materialized. But here, thinking about your points, Sarah, about kind of next generation, urban climate engagement that cuts across these areas that you're talking about. Are we beginning to see ways in which multiple local cities and jurisdictions in any of the three countries are beginning to formally work together and think about governance, or whether we're talking about the Mexican, Canadian and or US cases, ways that jurisdictions are formally looking to partner and collaborate on any of the things in water or climate that have been talked about thus far. Or should we really think of each state, city cases kind of independent or hermetically sealed? Thanks. I can jump in quickly. I think that's so it's a great question. And the first thing that comes to mind is that I know of several examples of maybe more informal working together or coordination or maybe even more on that, that learning kind of side of things. I remember talking to people in Toronto who had recently invited some folks who had recently invited some folks who had recently invited some folks who had recently invited some folks up from New York City and a think tank in Washington that's alluding me at the moment, right? They had invited them to come up to Toronto and tell them about what they'd been doing and how they might implement it in Toronto. So there was, there's definitely, and this is really common in cities in general, I think this idea of finding out what other cities are doing and trying to learn from that or kind of take what you can in that way. But I'm having trouble thinking of a more formalized example of coordinating and learning that way. Of course, there's examples within the U.S. and within Canada of doing that kind of coalition building. There's this kind of transfer and of both people and ideas from city to city. But it's a good question. I can't think immediately of a more formalized example. I don't know if the other panelists have examples. Yeah, just a small comment. I think there's a lot of opportunities starting with the binational cities or the sister cities along the border between the United States and Mexico. There's a lot of experience in terms of water there. But we have different regulation schemes and underground water is starting to being studied in the United States. We will need to move forward in international perhaps, a national agreement on underground water. And there are a lot of challenges ahead in terms of water vulnerability between these cities. We have been studying the case of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. And that's a nice case because in times of emergency El Paso has offered help to Ciudad Juarez. But all these customs regulations and all these border regulations that go beyond the custom aspects have been a barrier to actually setting motion on the collaboration among two cities that are pretty much a continuous built environment in that case. So I think we need to explore further which mechanisms we can implement there. Hilda, did you want to add anything? No, not really. Yes, there's been a sister cities movement now for quite a number of decades now. But you know, it's informal. It's very difficult to apply. Yes, you do learn from each other and so on. But it's very difficult to apply. You know, a model that worked in a different government context to another one. Yes, we can learn some things from such examples, but it's very difficult, I think, to apply them. Thank you very much. I'm going to ask a question that was actually asked by Professor John Chichari, who is the director of the International Policy Center here at the Ford School. However, with John's permission, I'm not going to read it word for word because I want to kind of tweak it so that we can make it more applicable to everyone's talks, which is the question of public versus private ownership of utilities. And this includes water and electricity. It's not only about the utility, but also about the generalist department of water and power as a somewhat, at least in the U.S. context, unique urban municipal utility. And how does that, but many cities in the U.S. have private utilities like Detroit, which is served by DTE. And then, you know, in Mexico I'm much less aware, but I believe it's all a nationalized utility. cities are able to do for climate on climate and whichever of you would like to go first, just jump right in. Sure, I'll jump in quick. I think it's a really good question. And I guess one way, in addition to the public, private, I mean, this comes up a lot in urban environmental policy a lot, like should we just give cities more authority? Is the answer here to just kind of put cities in charge or, you know, let mayors rule the world, you know, Benjamin Barber's book? I'm generally skeptical of that solution, you know, just did a broad sense as a broad blanket solution because we've got a lot of examples of cities really bungling things too, or, you know, taking really conservative or, you know, anti-environmental stances on issues too. So I don't know that we can, you know, kind of count on that as a for sure solution, you know, if we just gave more power to cities that we would see more action. It might be the case in some ways, but I think that it's a really, I get stuck on this question a lot, but I think in general, it's maybe learning from the successes that cities do have when they do have them and thinking about ways that they might apply to the, current power structures we have, that's probably where I would lean. I can add a little bit to this. I think that the real problem is the fact that we don't really have a metropolitan governance. And of course, you know, Mexico City, the greater metropolitan area of Mexico City is probably an exception. But until, I think if we had metropolitan governance then I think, yes, you could have the type of agency as we have here in LA, the LADWPs that for example is now trying to completely convert to green energy. Well together, but it's, you know, it's four million people but still is not metropolitan enough. It doesn't take in. I had a map at the beginning there that showed the consolidated metropolitan area. And the point I was gonna make is that, yes, it's a consolidated metropolitan area. Nevertheless, we don't have metropolitan governance. And I think that is a major problem. If we had that, then I think, yes, we could have, you know, the large water and power type of institutions that I think would be viable. But, you know, that's a very big agenda, a very big issue. I just to say something about Mexico and just to clarify, yes, we do have a metropolitan entity that is in charge of coordinating environmental issues. But in practice, it has just a few years operating and in practice is more focused on air quality than anything else. So we, even though that we have that in CPN metropolitan governance, we have a lot of work to do. And certainly in terms of climate change and water, those are issues that have not been fully addressed. And yes, we do have a system that is centralized at the federal level in terms of water and energy. Both of them are federalized. But cities have some room to decide if they are going to go towards a private public partnership or if they are going to go to a fully privatized model. And Mexico City is one of the cases. And the central city has a hybrid system. I mean, the tariffs and the collecting of money, it's defined by the local authorities and the private companies are in charge of the system and emitting the bills, but they actually do not define the tariffs. And this is perhaps changing because a couple of contracts were not renewed in the last weeks. So we will see what happens in terms of if the private partnership model is going to be a figure that will be still important in this government. And I'm talking about the federal government. And the last issue I want to add, it's in relation to the possibility of decentralizing water systems. That has a tension is that there's a trade-off between efficiency and a resilience of those systems that happens the same with energy. And there's a lot of things related to costs. When we decentralize waste service and we made that a problem of the municipalities, the problem that municipalities face were funding. So they need to work into a coalition of two, three different local governments in order to be able to even access to fund and build this infrastructure that they need. So that's an issue that we also need to think when we are thinking on the possibility of having decentralized systems or a high-brief centralized system of water. Great, and on the topic of funding, that actually ties in beautifully to the final question, which is directed towards Sarah, but Hilda and Gian certainly can add their thoughts. A lot of these city-level climate initiatives do require revenues. And the questioner notes that Los Angeles recently put in a local sales tax, but that that has been criticized for being regressive. The real question is, given cities limited power to raise revenues, obviously there's property taxes as well, do these kinds of climate-related readiness or climate activities in cities ultimately require state and federal support financially? And if so, how does the question of revenue play into all of this in terms of capacity? Sarah, you could go first. Sure, I mean, I think on the one hand, the short answer is yes. I mean, I think state and federal support is gonna be needed for the big infrastructure transitions we're talking about, absolutely. I mean, it's still possible for state and federal revenue generation to have equity impacts we're not happy with, but in general, I think that that funding is gonna need to be made available in some way. And this might be a bit of a cop-out, but I think in that example, my main interest is how do you get the support you need for a new initiative like that, right? So less debating the what and more focusing on the how. That said, but I think that we wanna be, of course paying attention to the instruments we're using and if they are, there's also gonna be effects on coalition willingness around those instruments as well. But like I said, yeah, I think short answer, absolutely, those big investments are gonna have to be part of coming from other places too. For the case of Mexico, it's exactly the same. Perhaps we also rely a lot on international funding. So the mechanisms for funding a green investments or low-carbon projects and stuff like that play a big role in our case. Most of the climate change actions, concrete actions that are happening in the country being funded either by international banks or by international corporations. So they play a huge role on that. Perhaps one of the ways that we need to explore further is the value capture of public investments in infrastructure. With that something that we have an explorer in Mexico, we have a lot of problems in terms of how the real estate market operates on the disconnection between the tax that is imposed to the property and the actual value on the market. So that's something that we need to work on in the future. And it's very hard to do. Columbia is a good case of a kind of successful case on that. Hilda, you get the last word if you want it. You're muted though. Myself. Right. Well, California may be kind of special around the country but the funding for water infrastructure in particular has been for LA and Southern California has been really stymied by the tax limits on property tax. And so we have relied more and more on trying to replace and upgrade the water infrastructure on state bond issues. And they have been more and more difficult to obtain and take much longer when they actually do happen because we're dealing with North, South type of issue where water comes from all the way up there and so on. And the people that live in the North of California say, well, it's really the South that's benefiting from these statewide bonds. And so we have had a lot of problems getting them passed. And so, I think we're waiting for President Biden's help with this infrastructure bill. Right, we have problems with the way that we finance this infrastructure in California. Thank you. As usual with these things, we could go on for several more hours but considering that we're already 20 minutes over, thank you all so much for participating. We do have one last NAC webinar event scheduled for April 20th on the topic of Sighting Renewable Energy and with that, a good afternoon to all.