Mexico City Gives 2010 Summit a Front Row Seat to the Climate Crisis

It’s been weeks since the Copenhagen climate talks ended, and the blame game hasn’t dulled but become more shrill. In all the finger pointing, one thing that has been lacking is consideration that achievement of a binding legal deal on climate change may be better served under the skies of a gritty, dynamic urban center in an emerging market country than a pristine old world capital.

In Mexico City, where the Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC meets again in late November with hopes of this time reaching a legally binding climate accord, developed countries will not so easily be able to ignore the pressure climate change will place on a majority of the world’s population — a population that is more cramped for space and has less wealth per capita than the people of major cities in developed countries around the world.

That developing countries will disproportionately bear the brunt of climate change is well known. By the time the temporal test year for emissions cuts, 2020 arrives, many emerging market countries — those that share characteristics mostly with developing but also have some characteristics of developed countries, countries the next climate agreement hinge on — will be coming of age.

Their recent economic past means that they have large urban centers characterized by slums (read: deep informal economies and dire lack of stable infrastructure) with high levels of poverty like developing countries but also burgeoning middle classes demanding access to resources and social stability like developed countries. Due to their geographic locations they will face, like developing countries, the brunt of climate change.

For emerging markets, whose major cities drive their economic growth, climate change fundamentally threatens economic development. Their national security is fundamentally dependent upon their economic development. Nowhere is the recognition for action on climate change more apparent therefore, than in major cities in emergent markets, like Mexico City.

Mexico City’s own adaptation plan notes,

“Due to its size in terms of population and economic activity, its role in the world, and its status as Mexico’s seat of government power, Mexico City is a major contributor to the problem [of climate change]; at the same time, it is an actor whose symbolic value cannot be underrated and a space in which the city’s vulnerability to the effects of climate change has become a national security issue.”

Emerging markets as a block — a block that the BASIC countries of Brazil, South Africa, India and China proved in Copenhagen have plenty of geopolitical moxie and are parting ways with the U.S. lately — will comprise nearly one-fifth of the global economy in the next decade. By 2020, China will be just a few years away from overtaking the U.S. as the world’s largest economy. Collectively, they will be in a position to displace the IMF and the World Bank in terms of aid to each other and to less-developed countries.