Local Leadership on Global Climate Crisis Highlighted in Resilience Summit

The Republican mayor of a California city, a Roman Catholic cardinal, Democratic governors from California and Massachusetts and grade-school students gathered in the same space last week to discuss the challenges society faces in dealing with climate change.

But unlike high-profile international climate negotiations, the emphasis of this summit was restricted to the community-level response to a future all but guaranteed to include more frequent natural disasters. The organizers of Innovate Locally to Inspire Change Globally agreed that the local level is where politics most easily yields to pragmatism in the search for solutions. 

The organization Climate-Resilient California and Californians (CRC2) held the virtual meeting that concluded Feb. 28 to celebrate the outsized importance of climate action on the part of cities, counties and states, but also to identify where even well-intentioned efforts go wrong.

“California is facing increasingly frequent and severe climate events like wildfires, drought and extreme heat,” said summit co-chair Samuel Assefa, director of the California Governor’s Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation. “Addressing these challenges requires solutions that not only respond to immediate needs but also promote long-term resilience.”

Event Chairman Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a climate scientist at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said the summit described California as well-positioned to substantially improve its response to climate-driven disasters but needs to figure out how to improve communication among cities, counties, the state and the research and advocacy communities.

“The right ecosystem is here in California. Very few states can claim that,” Ramanathan said. “What this meeting achieved was the various stakeholders talking to each other and everyone understanding the magnitude of what’s ahead of us.”

The sentiment was echoed by California Governor Gavin Newsom in a Feb. 27 session.

“We're at a point where we've all acknowledged the problem. We know ‘why’ but it’s the ‘how,’” said Newsom. “We're in the ‘how’ business in California. And we want to implement at scale. What I refer to at this moment is the great implementation to make real all of our promises. It's not about goal setting anymore. It's about achieving those goals.”

The January fires in Los Angeles set the tone for the summit, offering a stark example of the new reality communities will cope with. Cardinal Peter K.A. Turkson, chancellor of the Pontifical Academies of Sciences and Social Sciences, reminded participants that beyond the immediate tragedy, disasters can drive beneficial societal resets.

"Pope Francis says nobody emerges from a crisis the same way as when they entered the crisis,” said Turkson. “We’re supposed to learn from a crisis and come out of it better. We replan our journey. We set ourselves new rules. We discover new forms of commitment.”

By design, the summit was as bipartisan as its organizers could muster. Rex Parris, mayor of Lancaster, Calif. pointed out that bureaucratic red tape continues to hamstring practical climate solutions.

“In Lancaster, we just do not allow anything to stand in the way of energy efficient businesses that come to town. One day I found out that it was taking six months to get a building permit to put solar panels on your house. So I sent an email: From now on, it takes 45 minutes. Most of the obstacles we have are just antiquated business models.”

San Diego City Council President Joe LaCava, whose district includes the UC San Diego campus, touted advances the city has made such as its investment in the country’s first electric tugboat and its resilience-focused advisory boards, which are required to draw at least 25% of their membership from San Diego neighborhoods most vulnerable to climate-driven emergencies.

“Words must be turned into action,” LaCava said at a session titled Frontline Climate Extremes. “Goals must be turned into implementation. Our most important work comes in where and how we implement.”

Innovate Locally was the first of several subnational summits sponsored by the Vatican that are set to take place around the world over the next year.

The concept for the series grew from a May 2024 meeting at the Vatican of thought leaders along with mayors and governors from countries ranging from Japan to Kenya to the United States including California’s Gavin Newsom. The event produced a call to action reiterating the pontifical academies’ stance that of the world’s seven billion people, the poorest three billion produce no more than 10% of greenhouse gas emissions, but sustained 75% of economic losses associated with the effects of climate change.

The summit led to a guiding framework called MAST (mitigation, adaptation and societal transformation) that will help society thrive if the climate crisis can be abated. The authors advocated for a global effort to encourage societal transformation by means ranging from education to financing and the overcoming of political inertia to confront the problem at the pace required by current circumstances.

"While our aspirations for MAST are global, the scale of action and implementation is regional, where the impacts of climate disruption are felt in localized and personal ways,” said event co-chair Fonna Forman, a professor of political science at UC San Diego. “In local communities, we are likelier to cut through the divisions that are presently undermining robust collective action at broader scales. We need to work together, all of us, to protect California’s neighborhoods and communities.”

Scripps Oceanography’s Ramanathan co-chaired the May 2024 Vatican meeting with University of Massachusetts Chancellor Marcelo Suarez-Orozco. Pope John Paul II had appointed Ramanathan to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 2004. Since then, Ramanathan has worked with successive popes to highlight the social disparities associated with the effects of global warming and to chart courses of action such as those identified by Pope Francis in the 2015 encyclical Laudato Si. 

Besides Ramanthan, Assefa and Forman, the summit was hosted by Abby Edwards, senior deputy director of planning and policy at the Governor’s Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation; Christina Christie, dean of the UCLA School of Education; Debra Gore-Mann, CEO of the Greenlining Institute in Oakland, Calif.; and Jonathan Parfrey, CEO of Climate Resolve.

This summit series will culminate in a gathering at the Vatican during 2026 hosted by Pope Francis to launch a global movement in climate resilience for people and nature.

For Parris, that starts with learning to speak the language of new audiences that summit attendees hope to persuade.

"Start using the language they use. Quit using the language you use,” he said at a session focused on local-level success stories. “This is not about who's right or wrong. This is about saving our grandchildren. I'm prepared to do whatever I have to do and to use whatever words I have to use to get us there. All of us have the same view here. Why is it so hard to bring everyone together on it? It shouldn't be."