 expertise thank you thank you very much what for the introduction Rikky for the introduction to the whole thing and happy birthday it's very nice of you to invite us to celebrate with you and we should be celebrating because what urban age has done is a very creativity in importance The first thing can you hear me in the back row Very good ys the movement The I want to do is to come at this as an economist who has spent his whole life working on public policy and economic development. That's the way I got into this problem because climate change is all about development and it does need a great deal of public policy. It doesn't get solved by itself. Over the last years I've become more and more interested. The data is screematous that it's cities that are the huge drivers of all this. I've become more and more interested in cities. What you do at the London School of Economics, if you get interested in something, you go and find one of your colleagues or some of your colleagues who know about things you don't know about. That's why you're at a university and that's why in particular you're at the LSE. Thank you again to colleagues in cities who have taught me so much. I should also in doing this recognise Dimitri Zengalys. I don't know if Dimitri is here. There he is. Thank you for making it on time. Dimitri and I have collaborated on these issues over quite a long period. What I want to do is to talk about these three things you see in front of us before we dive into the city's story and of course the detail matters enormously. Let's just remind ourselves about the stakes that we're playing for and that's where I wanted to begin. That's just a couple of slides or so on why this thing matters so much and why we have to move quickly. I'll say then the bulk of what I have to say would be about cities but last of all I'm deeply involved in the story of Paris. I'm Amidu Sher for Laurent Fabius who is chairing the COP and on the strategic advisory committee for Christiana Figueres who is the executive secretary of the UNFCCC. So I'm directly involved, unpaid and unsupported I should say in those tasks but I'll just at the end give a couple of minutes on where I see Paris going. So essentially we should start by recognising that these next two decades are absolutely critical. There are two decades which will determine essentially the shape of what happens this century and indeed to the future of the relationship between human beings and the planet. Two reasons for that. One is that we're right on the edge with about 400 parts a million of CO2, nearly 450 parts a million CO2 equivalent. We're right on the edge of being possible to hold to two degrees and holding to two degrees really does matter. Beyond that it's dangerous. They're dangers of essentially irreversible events, self-reinforcing events, runaway events for example the thawing of the permafrost and the release of methane. So it's not for nothing that we think of two degrees as a borderline. It's dangerous and lots of nasty things happen before you get to two degrees but basically we're at the edge in terms of concentrations of greenhouse gases of being able to hold to two degrees. We still can and it's of course a vital in that story to look after our forests, look after our soils which can become much better stores of carbon and our oceans and biosystems. But we will determine probably in the next two decades just how well we're going to do on those fronts. It's an extraordinary responsibility that we have. We're actually lucky to be alive because there are so many exciting things that we can do but there is a grave responsibility. Let me talk about the scale of the risks and then emphasise the second reason why it's so important and that is around cities and what's happening to them. But I've said we're on the borderline being able to hold to two degrees but why are the risks of these three, four, five degrees so big? Well first we should recognise that we grew up as civilisations with the cultivation of grasses into grains. You sit and wait then for the grain to grow so you become stable, you have a surplus so you can have universities and this architects and that sort of thing. And that is a society which grew since the end of the last ice age. It's eight or nine thousand years old and in that period the temperature range has been plus or minus one. The baseline is the, we usually take is the 19th century before the fossil fuel powered industrial revolution really took off. We've grown up, we've become, our civilisations have become what they've come in a very narrow range. We are already just about one degree, see this year, 0.9 degrees if you average a bit over recent years, we're already on the edge of that very benign period. We are, as we're almost certain to do to get close to two degrees, we're already moving substantially beyond that climate. Three degrees we have not seen on this planet for three million years or so. We've been around Somersapiens maybe a quarter of a million years and as I emphasised we really grew up as civilisations in the last eight thousand years or so. We are into uncharted territory, we're starting that now, two degrees will be deep into that and three degrees will likely transform. Desertification much of southern Europe would look like the Sahara desert inundation as land-based ice-sheeps melt and sea levels could rise very rapidly. So it's very important to be aware of the stakes we're playing for because a lot of the things we're going to talk about today take time. So we have to begin by recognising we're in a hurry. We've got to make big investments, we've got to make big investments quickly but we've also got to recognise that those are incredibly productive, attractive investments and that's much of what we'll be talking about today. The kind of changes we're talking about would lead probably hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people to move because they'd rewrite where you could live and how you could live. So I won't go on about that much more but very strong underlining at the beginning of the stakes we're going to be playing for. Now, where are we in relation to Paris? Well, the Paris promises, they're called intended nationally determined contributions come in around 55 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent or so as flows of emissions in the year 2030. We're about 50 now. So it looks as though if you look at the contribution stated for Paris, there are about 160 countries covering about 90% of emissions that have made those intentions, set out those intentions. We're talking about a rise of about 10% in emissions over the next 15 years. A two degree path would really need about a 20% fall down to near 40. So we're going to go on on a difficult path from the point of view of holding to two degrees that is for another 15 years or so. That will mean that we have to take still stronger action than we might have had to take had we moved earlier. A path which recognises where we're going on the way to 2030 will need zero total emissions by the end of the century. That's not a political statement. That is looking at the amount of emissions we can make and still stay close to two degrees because it's the sum total over time that matters, not just the flow in any particular year. Looking at the sum total that we have left over if we're told to two degrees and looking at the next 15 years asking where we're going. And then if you do that you can work out pretty directly that you need zero total emissions by the end of the century. So that's the kind of planning we should make for and in order to do that it's likely that we're going to have to go close to zero emissions from electricity around mid century because so much of the rest of it is likely to be driven off electricity. And remember that we now have enough proven reserves of cold gas and oil so that we can only burn about half of them uncaptured and stay within two degrees. Again that's the physics and the arithmetic looking at how much space we've got left if we are to have a reasonable chance of holding to two degrees. So I've tried to do very quickly where we are in terms of concentrations, what risks we're playing for and the radicalness of the action that we're going to need to hold for two degrees. So we've got a big problem but the fun part of the story is that when you look at what you have to do it becomes enormously attractive. And really create cities and societies that matter. So let me say something about the story. And this is really the second reason why we have to act very quickly. We're around half of the world's population in cities now slightly over and that means there's a bit over three and a half billion people in urban areas. We'll probably be ballpark 70% of a population over 90, over nine billion people in cities by mid-century. That will be roughly six and a half billion people. So three billion people are going to come in in the next 35. It doesn't matter much whether it's 2.8 or 3.3. It's a very large increase relative to three and a half billion or so we have now. That happens only once in human history. After you've moved from 50% to 70% it slows down in terms of the fraction in urban areas. We can see from the demography that the population increase will probably slow down in the middle of this century too. So we are dealing with over the next 35 years a unique event in human history with our cities close to doubling and it won't happen again. But how we manage that is absolutely critical. We can manage it in a way that's very bad and that we stay with congested, polluted, unproductive, unattractive cities. Or we can manage it very differently. So that's the second reason. For that 35 years what we do in the next two decades really matters. So the point of view of the level of concentrations and the point of view of the growth that's coming in the size of cities. This next two decades is absolutely vital. I don't think that is well enough understood that this is a special period of responsibility. Those who lead, those who analyse, those who propose have to think about changing things rapidly and making this next 20 years the beginnings of something very different. Well cities are well placed because of the things I've described, the problems I've described. They're exciting returns to changing those things. You can make them much less congested, much less polluted, much less noisy and we can see much of what is necessary to do that. Innovation will be a big part of the story. I know Bruce Katz will be saying something about that. And this is a wonderful moment because you've got very low interest rates like didn't stay that way for a while yet and extraordinary technical progress in digital materials and biotechs. Big problems, big opportunities for growth, low interest rates, fastest technological progress the world has ever seen. That's not a description of a mammoth opportunity. I don't know what is. So we have to think very hard about how to make that happen. Cities are very attractive places to bring and create ideas. They've got together because of the productivity of getting together in terms of efficiency. They become very dynamic places. The best cities attract the best of talents and they can get their own dynamic processes of politics going once you start creating facilities for pedestrians and cyclists. You create a constituency of pedestrians and cyclists and they can be forces for further change. The cyclists are, as many of you know, one of the most powerful political forces in Copenhagen. Anybody tries to do anything, the monkey around with a cyclist will have a big political problem. They create their own dynamics for change. So great returns to cities, cities wonderful places for ideas. But we also know, and we have to be realistic about these things, that cities can go wrong. But they can also be places where innovation and social action happens. Getting a country together down one path can be very difficult. Getting a city together with a sense of community to go down a path can be and has indeed happened. But we also know that cities can get mired in corruption and difficulty. The way in which we think about institutions, the way in which we think particularly about the institutions of public finance, which is a big part of my research over the years, will be very important. But we shouldn't underestimate the political difficulties of change. Robert Putnam's study of Italian cities over the years showed very big differences between cities in terms of creativity, corruption and so on. But also that these things were very difficult to change because those characteristics carried on over a long period of time. But they can change and I'm sure we're going to get examples of how they do change. One note on public finances is absolutely at the heart of all this. I've been living and working in India for more than 40 years and China for more than 25. The way in which you see in those cases around the world, the way in which the public finances function, is enormously important. One of the reasons you've got such big urban sprawl in China is that the local public finance system is underdeveloped and much of the funding comes from selling land. If you want to get funding for local development you sell land on the fringes. The public finance story is very profound because urban sprawl in particular is so important to our problems. The story of design, that there are people in this room who know much more about the story of design than I do, but we did some work in the Better Growth Better Climate report which I co-chaired with Felipe Calderon and Dmitri and Philip and others worked very much on that, underlining the importance of compactness and avoidance of sprawl. I've already indicated the dangers of public finance in creating sprawl, but that is, I hope, something that we'll come back to. One example we gave in Better Growth Better Climate was the difference between Atlanta and Barcelona. Much the same income per capita, much the same population, but Atlanta uses six or seven times more, or gives off six or seven times more of emissions than Barcelona for the obvious reason that you drive around in Atlanta much more. Hands up, anybody here from Atlanta, by the way? All right, well I'll go forward. How many of you would rather live in Barcelona than Atlanta? These things matter, so we have to think about, and these things are going to be built right around the world, so we have to think very hard about how they're going to work. Now before I say something about Paris, let me just underline one thing, because this is changing the politics of climate change. We have begun to understand in the last four or five years the huge cost of air pollution around the world. It's been the last four or five years because we can see now much better through satellite observation where PM 2.5, where the other major particulates are in the world. The China has woken up to this very strongly. It's been a big part of the changes which it is making. A recent Berkeley earth paper found that breathing in many of Chinese cities is like smoking 40 cigarettes a day. Thirteen of the top 20 most polluted cities are in India, only one of the top 50s in China. We keep talking about China. It's much worse elsewhere, and we know it's very bad in London too. 30,000 Supreme Court about four months ago accepted a study, UK Supreme Court, accepted a study which said that 29,000 people die a year from air pollution in the UK, perhaps 10,000 of them in London. 1,700 people killed in the UK from road accidents. 15 times more air pollution. If the evening standard quite rightly makes a great deal of a cyclist being crushed under a lorry, it's terrible. But so too is the many people whose lives are cut short by air pollution. It is a huge problem and millions die each year around the world and a big part of it is caused by transport and particularly by coal in various ways. So this is something that's now beginning to change that politics and I think it's enormously important to understand it. I grew up in a London which was really foggy. I had to walk home from school three miles sometimes when they took the buses off the road because you couldn't see and we acted very quickly actually and switched to smokeless fuel. Sometimes the politics can change very quickly. The congestion charge came into London. Everybody said it's hopeless, never going to happen. Actually it happened very quickly. So if we can help deepen the understanding not only of how big the problems are but also that there's so much we can do to handle them. Let me change, let me finish with saying something about Paris. The French Presidency has their Paris Alliance for Climate Action. They've got four pillars. The first of them is the legal text. The legal text will describe how you measure, how you share what you've measured. It will describe how we get together to revise the pledges or the promises that people have made for 2030. That will be the text of the agreement and that will be binding. It will be an agreement. It will be called an international agreement because you can't call it an international treaty or international protocol because if you do it, it has to go to the US Senate and nobody wants to go to the US Senate. But it will be an international agreement and President Obama will be able to sign it because of that. That will be the formal thing. The number three are very important also although they are not binding agreements in any sense. I've already spoken about the numbers. Each country has over 160 countries have put in their numbers of where they plan to be in 2030 and given policies that could guide them. They are important and I think we should take them seriously. Most of the numbers that were put in around Copenhagen and Cancun in terms of where people plan to be for 2020 look like being met. Even though there's not a formal binding treaty policed by police from Mars and judged by judges from Venus, that is not there. You wouldn't expect it to be there. You wouldn't expect it to work. But these things do matter and they are being considered and policies have come so it's right to take them very seriously. I haven't got time to talk about finance. That matters. That's the third pillar. But the action agenda is particularly relevant today. These are countries coming together to... Sorry. These are not countries coming together. They're cities coming together. They're businesses coming together. NGOs, innovation will be a very big part of that. President Obama and Prime Minister Modi and Bill Gates will make an announcement on November 30 about how they'll go forward with innovation. So that's the first part of the story to understand what it is that they're doing. They're trying to create a Paris alliance with those four pillars. Now why is Paris not Copenhagen? How many people were at Copenhagen? There are at least a handful of people there where it was cold and it was chaotic and it was quarrelsome. But it did produce the Copenhagen Accord which became the agreement a year later in Cancun. But the politics was very, very difficult. It was still very divided into rich countries and poor countries. It's still divided but nowhere like to the extent and the pledges have come in on an equal basis, no distinction between rich countries and poor countries. The preparation has been much better and it was very well... The text process began last year in Lima, very well organised by the Prubians. The President's Prime Ministers and indeed princes will come at the beginning, not at the end. They will say to their people, you get on with it, we want an agreement. Don't come back without an agreement. The chaos of Copenhagen had many dimensions but one dimension of the chaos at Copenhagen is that they had all the people at the end and they thought all their people would have done their job and they just had to sign. Well they ended up trying to negotiate themselves in a small room that is not the way they are going to go. There will be some grand standing in the last weeks and days. It's happening now because you have to go for unanimity so you are going to get a few holdouts at the end. So don't be surprised by that. But the basic test of success is not the level of the promises for 2030. I've already discussed that and I've already said that they are much better than business as usual but they are not nearly what we need for two degrees. What the test of success is whether we regard this as a turning point and whether there are sound reasons for believing there is going to be acceleration from there. I do think it is a turning point and we have to look at what comes to see whether there are sound reasons for thinking there might be an acceleration. But our job as academics, as policy advisors, as politicians, whatever it is, journalists, whatever it is that you are, our job is to try to see how we can contribute to that acceleration because that's what we need in the road from Paris but that also is what I think with cities at the centre of it all what is supremely possible and enormously attractive. Thank you very much.