Arup has announced a renewal of its partnership with C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40) to affect meaningful, measurable and sustainable action on climate change.

Led by its ambition to shape a better world, Arup will back cities to rapidly reduce emissions to prevent catastrophic climate change. Together, Arup and C40 will work with city mayors on programmes to improve energy efficiency, reduce waste and encourage a move towards a more circular economy.

Arup is trebling its previous commitment by pledging $3 million of advisory support to C40 over three years. The partnership will build on innovative projects such as Deadline 2020 – a new approach to climate action planning for C40 member cities. Together, Arup and C40 will explore how consumption patterns in cities need to change and how data can support decision making and the monitoring of progress against climate action plans.

“This has both global and local impact,” says Damane Hlalele, Arup Director and South African Integrated Planning and Development lead, “with the C40 Cities South Africa Buildings Programme being launched recently we are excited to see a real commitment from South African city leaders and look forward to the opportunities that will result.”

Greg Hodkinson, Arup Group Chairman commented: "With more than half of humanity living in cities, they with their mayors are vital actors to bring about genuine change in support of the Paris Agreement. Through collaboration and the sharing of knowledge, we can work together to ensure that cities can play their parts in preventing dangerous climate change. We have pledged to extend our partnership with C40 to build on the work we have done to date. More needs to be done to help city leaders with their programmes to reduce emissions and better adapt their populations to the very real threats posed by climate change. Last year’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Global Warming reinforced how critical this is.”

Mark Watts, C40 Executive Director, stated: “When the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, C40 and Arup immediately set to work calculating what the deal and the 1.5 degrees global warming target meant for the world’s great cities. Thanks to that ground-breaking analysis, more than 70 C40 cities are now developing climate action plans consistent with the emissions cuts that science tells us are needed to prevent catastrophic climate change – raising their previous ambition by a combined 13 gigatons of carbon, equivalent to the annual emissions of the US, Russia and China combined.

We are grateful to Arup for their generous support and look forward to collaborating on even more projects that will help create the sustainable, prosperous and healthy cities of the future.”

To date, Arup and C40 have worked together on more than 25 projects affecting hundreds of climate actions in C40 network cities. Projects have ranged from research on science-based climate targets for cities, data analysis and reporting on climate actions, to technical support to cities in the areas of low carbon energy, building energy efficiency and sustainable transportation.