a big thank you to the 40 authors, each of whom agreed without any persuasion to provide their amazing chapters. You have been, and continue to be, great friends and great human beings. Your dedication to a better environment and a better future has shone through. It has made the book feel hopeful that something even better is ahead of us.
Authors Biographies
Peter Boyd
The Ambitious City – This chapter presents a case for combining high ambition with high clarity of definition for what we mean by “Net-Zero”, highlighting the need to combine this high ambition with an appreciation and embrace of systems thinking, given the unique, complex, and intertwined nature of each city’s challenges and opportunities.
Peter Boyd is Lecturer at the Yale School of the Environment, Lecturer in the Practice of Management at the School of Management, and Resident Fellow at the Center for Business and the Environment. Outside Yale, he is a director of REDD.plus, a digital platform to bring UN-registered REDD + forest carbon credits to a new cross-sector world of purchasers who want to achieve Paris-Agreement-compliant carbon neutrality as they transition to net-zero. Working with these and other partners, he is Founder of Time4Good, helping leaders and teams connect purpose to maximum positive impact.
He is former COO of Sir Richard Branson’s Carbon War Room; former Chair of the Energy Efficiency Deployment Office for the UK Department of Energy & Climate Change; and former Project Lead for the B Team’s “Net- Zero” initiative, focused on business encouragement, of an ambitious Paris Agreement at COP21. Following his first job with McKinsey & Co., his private-sector experience included over ten jobs in 12 years at the Virgin Group, including CEO of Virgin Mobile South Africa. Peter is originally from Edinburgh, Scotland; studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford; and now lives in Connecticut, where he serves as Chair of Sustainable Westport.
Martin Powell
The Civilized City – This chapter looks at the transformation of cities through time and how we can apply those learnings for a better future. Local solutions will tackle the global climate crisis.
Martin Powell was Environmental Advisor to the former Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, responsible for policy in water, waste, air quality, energy, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and biodiversity. He was also director for the design and delivery of the city’s environmental programmes.
As Managing Director of Cambridge Management & Research, Martin worked for the Energy Saving Trust and the Institute for Sustainability and was Special Advisor to the C40 Cities Group chaired by Michael R. Bloomberg during his time as Mayor of New York. An engineer, he built his career working with organizations to structure their projects and programmes. Martin is also a trustee at Heart of the City, a charity that supports SMEs in London to tackle issues including climate action.
He has held several roles at Siemens including Global Head of Urban Development and is currently Head of Sustainability and Environmental Initiatives at Siemens Inc., with a focus on financing climate action.
Austin Williams
The Emerging City – Some countries don’t need western lectures on sustainable development; they simply need to be allowed to develop. This chapter is about development without prefixes, full stop. This is Malawi’s story.
Austin Williams is a senior lecturer in Professional Practice in Architecture at Kingston School of Art in London and Honorary Research Fellow at XJTLU University, Suzhou, China. He is director of the Future Cities Project, and the author of China’s Urban Revolution: Understanding Chinese Eco-cities (Bloomsbury, 2017) and New Chinese Architecture: Twenty Women Building the Future (Thames and Hudson, 2019).
Austin founded the mantownhuman manifesto featured in Penguin Classics’ 100 Artists’ Manifestos. He has spoken at a wide range of conferences, from New York to Ningbo, from Hawaii to Hong Kong, and is a regular media commentator on development, environmentalism, and China. He has written for magazines as diverse as Nature, Wired, Top Gear, Wallpaper, Times Literary Supplement, and The Economist. He has directed over 200 short documentaries for NBS TV and authored and illustrated the Shortcuts design guides. For more information see WeChat/Twitter: Future_Cities andwww.futurecities.org.uk.
Patricia Holly Purcell
The Sustainable City – This chapter sets out the UN global frameworks for tackling climate change and the SDGs, how local governments feature in these international agendas, and the role of cities in advancing solutions to some of the greatest challenges of our time.
Patricia Holly Purcell has more than 15 years’ experience in the public and private sectors leading global sustainability initiatives for multinational corporations and the UN. She is currently a private sector specialist for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), focused on unlocking and leveraging private sector engagement and investment to support increased ambition of countries’ climate change goals and delivering opportunities to scale solutions across key sectors of the economy, including energy, ecosystems, health, and agriculture, among others.
Patricia is co-founder and Chair of the OECD Expert Group on Investing in the SDGs in Cities. Before joining UNDP, she served as Senior Strategic Advisor and Head of Partnerships to the UN Global Compact in New York. Previously, she was Senior Advisor to the UN Under Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN-Habitat, based in their Nairobi headquarters, where she led the Agency’s strategic policy and programmatic initiatives, including creation of a global multilateral trust fund for sustainable development in conjunction with the World Bank. Prior to this, she served as Technical and Strategic Adviser to the Special Representative to the UN Secretary-General on Disaster Risk Reduction, based in Geneva.
Before joining the UN, Patricia was the founding director of Commercial Sustainability for the London-based Willis Group, a global insurance broker covering 180 countries. She began her career as a London-based financial journalist with an emphasis on climate change, writing for The Economist, The Financial Times, The Times, and The Guardian. She holds a Master’s degree in Public Policy and Management from the University of York with a focus on the nexus between climate change and inequality, and is currently pursuing a PhD. She is originally from New York City and presently lives in Barcelona.
Amanda Eichel and Kerem Yilmaz
The Vocal City – Recognizing cities and the voice of cities in the 2015 Paris Agreement was the culmination of a nearly 30-year effort from advocates, city networks, and cooperative initiatives. There are, however, limits to what cities and the community that supports them can do alone – the voice of cities must better connect with the capabilities, skills, and learnings from other levels of government, as well as outside perspectives, to deliver action that both is locally appropriate and ensures climate friendly outcomes.
Amanda Eichel was the former Executive Director of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy based in Brussels. Previously, Amanda led efforts to grow the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group under the chairmanship of Michael Bloomberg, where she built regional and programmatic teams and directed research and knowledge management efforts. Before joining C40, Amanda worked for New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability and served as Climate