Kyoto Calls on World Mayors to Create Global Warming Council

Kyoto City announced on June 15, 2005 that its mayor, Yorikane Masumoto, will call on mayors of the world to create a "World Mayors' Council on Climate Change" (tentative name), an international network of municipalities dedicated to curbing global warming. The council would work in cooperation with the International Council on Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), with which about 470 local governments from 67 countries are affiliated.

With the aim of creating an inter-city network to promote fulfillment of Kyoto Protocol commitments for greenhouse gas emission reductions, the council will foster international cooperation on global warming countermeasures, information exchanges on advanced strategies and experience-sharing among municipalities.

Kyoto City will invite the world's municipalities to send representatives to the council's inaugural meeting, scheduled to take place concurrently with the First Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (COP11/MOP1), scheduled for this November in Montreal. Its secretariat will be established at ICLEI headquarters in Toronto, Canada, and Toronto's mayor David Miller is expected to assume the office of chair.

Kyoto City has been promoting Japan's pioneering environmental efforts. For example, as the birthplace of the Kyoto Protocol, it almost immediately set a goal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 10 lower than 1990 levels by 2010, and has enacted and implemented Japan's first Local Global Warming Countermeasure Ordinance. The city sent a message to call for cooperative effort in dealing with climate change to more than 500 municipalities around the world on February 16, 2005, when the Kyoto Protocol entered into force.

http://www.ccre.org/news_detail_en.htm?ID=536
- Kyoto City Enacts Japan's 1st Local Global Warming Countermeasure Ordinance (Related JFS article)
http://www.japanfs.org/db/951-e

Posted: 2005/08/27 04:54:23 PM
Japanese version