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    		•  For fast breaking information on the Clinton and C40 climate program developments, we refer you to their websites at http://clintonfoundation.org and http://c40cities.org respectively (each appears in own window). What follows are our summaries as per this date (28 June 2007), reinforced by feedback from the several search engines as indicated below.

    From the Clinton Climate Initiative

    From 14-17 May 2007, mayors, chief climate officials and business leaders from 45 cities met in New York for the second C40 Large Cities Climate Summit to share best practices, identify collaborative projects and chart future action in the fight against global warming. To see who attended and what they accomplished, visit www.nycclimatesummit.com/.

    • Click here for NYC Summit II Press Book

    During the May Summit, President Clinton announced a new program that brings together cities, building owners, banks and energy-service companies to make changes to existing buildings to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For more information on how this announcement will allow cities to save money and help save our planet, click here.

    In addition to coordinating this program, CCI is providing direct assistance to individual cities and facilitating the sharing of best practices. CCI is also working to organize a purchasing consortium that will help cities buy energy efficient technologies at lower prices and create a measurement and information tool to help cities take an inventory of energy use to help direct future activities. For the latest news and programs, visit www.c40cities.org/.

    While the Clinton Foundation will focus its technical assistance activities on the C40, whose participants can be leaders for all cities, the direct benefits from the purchasing consortium and the measurement tools will be made available to other cities as well. Stay tuned for more information.

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    From C40 Large Cities Climate Leadership Group

    The C40 Large Cities Climate Leadership Group has invited 40 large cities to participate in its efforts: Addis Ababa Chicago Johannesburg Mexico City Sao Paulo Bangkok Delhi Karachi Moscow Seoul Beijing Hanoi Lagos Mumbai Shanghai Berlin Hong Kong* Lima New York Sydney Bogota Ho Chi Minh City London Paris Tokyo Buenos Aires Houston Los Angeles Philadelphia Toronto Cairo Istanbul Madrid Rio de Janeiro Warsaw Caracas Jakarta Melbourne Rome

    The Clinton Climate Initiative has visited nearly all of these cities and is already working with them to define projects. The few remaining cities, marked with stars, are expected to finalize official approvals of C40 participation in the coming months.

    The C40 also has invited a number of additional cities that have been leaders in reducing greenhouse gas emissions to be associated with the group. Associate cities include Austin, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Curitiba, Heidelberg, Portland, Rotterdam, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Seattle, Stockholm, and Vancouver. Where these cities are exemplary, CCI will facilitate the exchange of their expertise and best practices to other cities in the C40 that are interested in implementing similar emissions reduction measures. New Orleans has also been invited to join due to our desire to assist its rebuilding efforts.

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    From the New Mobility Agenda support program

    The informal New Mobility Agenda collaboration, that started on an ad hoc basis in support of the Clinton Climate Initiative with respect to the challenges of CO2 etc. reductions specifically in terms of transport in cities, continued and gained momentum over the period March - June. Our role is one of offering an independent source of ideas, materials, references and counsel in our principal area of recognized competence which we hope will complement and fill out the huge amount of work that they are carrying out in all the sectors they are working with (industry, buildings, water, waste, energy, as well as transport in cities). This collaboration is still finding its way, but the initial results are, we think, encouraging.

    1. "Reinventing transport in cities" - First reports in series (in process):

    Several working draft reports have been initiated in a new Politics of Transportation series. These are aimed at informing mayors, city councils and local government more generally about the key issues and eventual solutions when it comes to the political and strategic "Reinventing transport in cities". The following drafts are now are available for private review and comment.

    We also intend to seek support to underwrite additional reports in this series.

    • "City New Mobility Reports". The initial model for these will be the above Paris case study. In each case, it will be necessary to have strong local support for these volumes, and in most case we anticipate that they will be carried out with local partners and co-authors. Each of the reports must be fully independent if they are to retain their value and be credible and useful. It takes roughly two full months of work with strong local support to make something useful of these reports.

    • New Mobility Advisory/Briefs: In addition to the City Bike report which opens this series , we also anticipate that short but autorotation overviews from the specific angle of the politics of transportation will look at Bus Rapid Transit, Congestion Charging/Road Pricing, and Carsharing. See the site at www.newmobilitybriefs.org for more on this. (This site is in the process of being updated.)

    We envisage these reports to average about 50 pages or less, with an Executive Summary of less than five pages looks hard at issues of politics, payoffs, strategies, and implementation. They are aimed to inform mayors and local government. The intention is that these opening summaries will provide the full justification for looking at the full report in each case, but be scanable in ten minutes or so. Our mayors don't have a lot of time to give over to reading prose. (Each report is supported by online materials and international expert commentary intended to ensure balanced reporting on these often highly conflicted topics.)

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    2. Cities for Mobility

    We have started to collaborate with this new international cities program, for which you can find full background information at www.cities-for-mobility.org. The CfM program provides an interesting complement to the Clinton/Large Cities Climate Initiative on several grounds: First, it is entirely given over to the mobility/transportation issues. Second, the team behind it has accepted that the mobility agenda needs to be strongly reinforced by the Climate issues, which put just about everything into substantially higher public visibility, while greatly tightening the time horizon for remedial action. Finally, it involves many more cities (to now more than three hundred) many of which medium sized and smaller.

    Eric Britton provided the keynote address opening the first CFM Congress on 11 June, for which you can click here to the full presentation as well as the audio track. (Note: You may find it useful to call up the original PowerPoint slides and in parallel call in the corresponding audio file. They work pretty well together.)

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    3. Exploratory City Workshops and Presentations

    Accelerated Learning Sessions.

    Now that the Paris visits, first round meetings and presentations, and case report are well in hand, we have started to reach out and organize a first cycle of short new mobility missions, combining one or more public presentations (see below for some raw materials for these) which then are further fleshed out by a certain number of workshops, open discussions, and brainstorming sessions with key groups in each host city. We call these Accelerated Learning Sessions. A typical collaborative program takes from three to five days, and in each case the EcoPlan team is being welcomed by and working directly with the mayors, their key planning and policy teams, the key concerned agencies and a wide array of local agencies and interests.

    The first collaborative project in the series was organized in the City of Stuttgart from 8 - 13 June 2007, and reported directly to the City's Mayor and his senior staff. Additional city projects are presently under discussion in the US for the month of August.

    To get a first idea of how an initial presentation in this series might be organized you can click just below to either a PDF or the full PowerPoint version of the revised presentation that was prepared after the Stuttgart evens. It should pretty much explain itself, but if you have any questions please get in touch via cities@newmobility.org. (Note: these are quite large files and you may want to be a bit prudent and make sure that your bandwidth is up to the task. In all cases you can find the file size indicated along with the software needed to make it spin.)

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