Center for Innovative Diplomacy Archive

LOS ANGELES, July 19-The city of Irvine, in a move applauded by environmentalists and denounced by some manufacturers, has approved what is thought to be the nation's most comprehensive ordinance restricting the use of chlorofluorocarbons and other compounds known to deplete Earth's ozone layer. 

The ordinance, approved 4 lo 1 Tuesday night by the City Council, will affect producers or users of CFC's in Irvine, a planned community about 55 miles south of Los Angeles that is home to many high-technology industries. Irvine Mayor Larry Agran predicts many jurisdictions will follow Irvine's example.

On September 5-8, 1990 local government officials from 43 nations gathered at the United Nations in New York to establish an international agency of local government called the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (Local Initiatives).  With support from local government organizations such as the national league of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors and their worldwide counterparts, Local Initiatives is governed by an Executive Committee of local government and environmental experts from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Switzerland, Zimbabwe, ivory Coast, the United Kingdom, Norway, Finland, the Soviet Union, Turkey India, The Philippines, Australia, and elsewhere.  The agency is currently developing formal affiliations with the United Nations and the world’s preeminent organization of local governments, the International Union of Local Authorities (IULA).

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 7 – Expressing impatience with the slowness of national governments, municipal leaders from around the world agreed today that local governments must take action on their own to address global warming and other broad environmental threats. 

After hearing a procession of speakers who warned the problems were too serious to wait, the mayors and other community leaders decided to form a new group, the International Council for Local Enviromental Initiatives, to provide mutual help in coping with common concerns like water pollution, toxic waste, deforestation and the greenhouse effect.

In order to secure an environmentally sustainable future, the world's local governments must begin to restructure social and economic life at the local level.

The problems of solid waste, water pollution, transnational air pollution, climate change, stratospheric ozone

depletion, forest and soil loss, and environmental degradation in the developing world cannot adequately be addressed without a thorough mobilization at the local government

level.

By the end of the 20th century more than half of the world's population will live in urban areas. As the centers of industrialized life, cities are the major sources of garbage, sewage, chemical wastes, greenhouse gases and ozone depleting compounds. Standards for

dealing with these wastes can be set at the national and international government levels, but such standards can only be implemented in an effective and timely way with local government assistance. Globally, local governments are often in the best position to correct unsustainable land use, construction, transportation, energy, agriculture and waste management practices of modern life.

As local government leaders, we gather for a World Congress of Local Governments for a Sustainable Future, as a first step in exchanging successful local strategies, in alliance with the United Nations for the development and implementation of a global environmental

agenda. We further call for the establishment of an International Secretariat for Local Environmental Initiatives to coordinate, assist and promote local government implementation of sound environmental policy.

In order to secure an environmentally sustainable future, the world's local governments must begin to restructure social and economic life at the local level.

The problems of solid waste, water pollution, transnational air pollution, climate change, stratospheric ozone

depletion, forest and soil loss, and environmental degradation in the developing world cannot adequately be addressed without a thorough mobilization at the local government

level.

By the end of the 20th century more than half of the world's population will live in urban areas. As the centers of industrialized life, cities are the major sources of garbage, sewage, chemical wastes, greenhouse gases and ozone depleting compounds. Standards for

dealing with these wastes can be set at the national and international government levels, but such standards can only be implemented in an effective and timely way with local government assistance. Globally, local governments are often in the best position to correct unsustainable land use, construction, transportation, energy, agriculture and waste management practices of modern life.

As local government leaders, we gather for a World Congress of Local Governments for a Sustainable Future, as a first step in exchanging successful local strategies, in alliance with the United Nations for the development and implementation of a global environmental

agenda. We further call for the establishment of an International Secretariat for Local Environmental Initiatives to coordinate, assist and promote local government implementation of sound environmental policy.

Proposed Agenda for Meeting of the Executive Committee

International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives

January 11-13, 1990

London, United Kingdom

01-ICLEI-Planning Document #1

02- ICLEI-Planning Document - Proposed Agenda & Schedule

03- ICLEI-Planning Document - Strategic Plan

04- ICLEI-Planning Document - Minutes of September 1990 Meetings

05- ICLEI-Planning Document - Financial Status

06- ICLEI-Planning Document - Proposed Charter Revisions

07- ICLEI-Planning Document - Proposed Articles of Incorporation

08- ICLEI-Planning Document - Proposed By-laws

09- ICLEI-Planning Document - Proposed Membership Dues Structure

10- ICLEI-Planning Document - Proposed budget & Cash Flows

11- ICLEI-Planning Document – Fiscal Sponsorship

12- ICLEI-Planning Document – City Host Proposals

13- ICLEI-Planning Document – Officers/Secretary General

When Tip O'Neill said, "All politics is local," he was talking about the way political issues are shaped by local interests. Defense policy, for example, logically calls for an overview of national-security needs, yet it is often dictated by employment levels in factories that happen

to depend on defense contracts and are in the district of an influential congressman. In such cases, local interest debases the issue with a shortsighted and self-serving perspective. But there's another kind of local politics, and it works in a way that's almost completely opposite. For instance, the City Council of Irvine, California, recently passed legislation restricting the use of chlorofluorocarbons within the city limits. This legislation will cause hardships for local businesses and raise the cost of some consumer goods for local people, and these sacrifices will not be rewarded by any special environmental benefits to the citizens of Irvine. Everyone in the world, and for generations to come, will benefit, but only by an infinitesimal amount, and the citizens of Irvine no more than anyone else. From a realist's point of view, Irvine's action seems almost unnatural; it's idealistic, even quixotic, for little Irvine to take responsibility for the sky. And yet on an emotional level the action seems exactly right.

RVINE, Calif. - The local newspaper here, the Irvine World News, was graced with its global title by executives of Irvine Co. who wanted to communicate the "new world of

Irvine" to Southern Californians settling this Orange County frontier in 1972. 

It does not print international news. 

But the paper couldn't be better named from the perspective of Larry Agran, this city's mayor. The 44-year-old, Harvard-educated chief executive has set a global agenda for this Southern California town of 100,000 people.

SO EXASPERATED was one city in southern California with the general lack of action to protect the ozone layer that it has passed its own law restricting the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) within its 7,000-acre jurisdiction. From next summer on, businesses in Irvine that use ozone-depleting compounds must adapt their equipment to prevent the stuff from entering the atmosphere. Irvine is the first city to enact such a ban, though others, including Los Angeles, have placed restrictions on plastic food-packaging that contains CFCs. A mote in the global eye, maybe, but not unusual behaviour for Irvine.

LOW-LYING countries like Bangladesh could disappear under rising oceans within 100 years, a Perth conference was told yesterday. 

That was one of several chilling warning delivered not by a radical “greenie” but by a speaker at the International Union of Local Authorities World Congress. 

Mr. Jeb Brugmann, an economist and field programs director of the Centre for Innovative Diplomacy in Massachusetts, said rises in ocean levels caused by the Greenhouse Effect could send a human flood of refugees through India. 

"This could begin extremely volatile mass migrations in the Indian sub-continent:' he said.

Such migrations would increase as people were forced to leave expanding areas of desert such as the Sahara and Central Asia and areas of extreme drought such as parts of South America.