Marvin Rees TED Talk: How is your city tackling the climate crisis?

Recorded back in April in Vancouver in Session 9 of TED 2022, six speakers explored an intentionally provocative whiplash of ideas tied to city life, from ancient, leaderless metropolises to future cities on Earth and Mars.

Delivering his talk on how cities can tackle the climate crisis, Marvin Rees, mayor of Bristol and represented by Sophie Laurimore at The Soho Agency since 2020, aimed to highlight that although cities are a major contributor, global collaboration can actually make cities key to the solution.

Throughout his talk, Marvin aimed to highlight that avoiding the worst of the climate crisis, means reimagining our world’s cities. Today, cities occupy three percent of the world’s land and are responsible for around 75 percent of CO2 emissions. But the same quality that makes them such large emitters — their dense populations — also creates unique opportunities for combatting climate change. From London to Kampala, cities around the world are working together to meet the moment: waste management systems are turning food waste into fertilizer, net-zero housing is combatting urban sprawl and ambitious infrastructure projects are designing out car dependency. But to unlock the full potential of cities, Rees emphasises that we need to collaborate across borders to fund green infrastructure, viewing cities as global assets rather than national possessions.

To watch the full TED Talk click here.