Elected officials: Please attend the mayoral climate summit

Boldly speaking: We need to discuss climate change in our local government.

Climate change: two words that strike fear to the point of helplessness and hopelessness. But we have solutions, if we work together at the local, state, national and international levels, and if we can bring together people with different perspectives.

Next week Chicago will host the first mayoral North American Climate Summit. The mayoral Climate Summit will gather municipal leaders from the United States and around the world to discuss commitments to the Paris Agreement, and to recognize innovative and impactful efforts by local governments to address climate change.

Illinois communities need to ask all our municipal leaders to attend the mayoral Climate Summit. Mayors and other leaders will understand that we are not alone in pursuit of solutions, gain inspiration from others, develop connections, and bring back concrete knowledge and best practices to make environmental changes locally. Without those essential elements, communities may not move forward in addressing what is urgent.

Presidents, prime ministers, and other heads of state for the United Nations countries have gathered annually for more than two decades to address human-caused climate change. In November, two years after the Paris Agreement was negotiated, I attended the 23rd UN Climate Change Conference as a League of Women Voters delegate.

This UN Conference in November had a resounding theme: heads of state set the framework in the Paris Agreement to limit global warming, but now we also need state and local governments, businesses and individuals to reach the goals the nations have set. Now the hard work of implementing each country’s commitment is deeply in progress, and at the UN, the world clearly indicated that change must happen bottom-up and top-down. The United States was strongly represented at the UN Conference by state and local governments and business leaders, indicating our commitment to leadership at all levels, even though the US has not actually withdrawn from the Paris Agreement.

People with different perspectives are coming together around climate change. At the UN Conference, both Republicans - Arnold Schwarzenegger, and many others - and Democrats - Jerry Brown, and many others - spoke about critical environmental issues. Climate-change-aware people worldwide expressed the understanding that health is inextricably linked to a clean environment, and the movement to clean energy is both unstoppable and good for the economy. Every UN country around the world has signed the Paris Agreement, including, this fall, Nicaragua and Syria. And the UN passed a Gender Action Plan to ensure that women are involved in climate decisionmaking and solutions.

Solutions are happening at the municipal level, around the world. Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh, the mayor of Malmö, Sweden, spoke eloquently at the UN Conference, saying that every decision made within her local government considers how climate change will be impacted.

All our local governments need to attend this mayoral Climate Summit and consider climate change in every decision we make. The Summit is an exciting opportunity to connect, motivate, learn more, and bring that home, especially since Chicago is conveniently located near our communities.

I have never been able to figure out precisely what environmentalism is; I only know that people call me an environmentalist whenever I express sentiments about sustaining life on our earth. But at the UN conference, the more than 20,000 attendees expressed that we are in this together: conservatives and liberals, from every race and religion, landlocked and island states, representing all continents. Because we are in this together, we are all environmentalists.

The North American Climate Summit website is at https://northamericanclimatesummit.splashthat.com.