Mayors from 25 cities around the world, representing 150 million citizens, pledged on Sunday (12 November) to cut their carbon emissions to net zero by 2050, while boosting efforts to become more resilient to extreme weather and other pressures linked to climate change.

They pledged to put in place by 2020 their new, ambitious climate action plans, to be developed with help from the C40 Cities network.

The cities – spanning the globe from Accra to London to Rio de Janeiro – will also make clear to their residents the wider social, environmental and economic benefits of stepping up climate action.

In addition, C40, which supports cities in tackling climate change, will aid nine large African cities, including Cape Town, Addis Ababa, Lagos and Nairobi, to craft long-term green plans that align with the goals of the 2015 Paris deal to curb global warming, with backing from the German government.

”African cities are playing a leading and decisive role in delivering on the ambition of the Paris Agreement,” Paris Mayor and C40 chair Anne Hidalgo said in a statement.

Separately, the almost 7,500 cities in the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy said their commitments combined would equal the reduction of nearly 1.3 billion tonnes of carbon emissions per year by 2030 – the size of Japan or Brazil’s emissions, said Christiana Figueres, vice chair of the alliance.

It also launched a new global standard for measuring and reporting emissions from cities and local governments, to be applied from 2018.

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