I'm Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. Today's show features the mayor of my home base of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti. He is the head of C40 Cities, a network of the world's megacities tackling the climate crisis together. In his TED 2020 conversation with Ted Current Affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rogers,

Garcetti talks about climate action, but also his handling of the pandemic,

how mask wearing got politicized in the U.S. and the ways these problems are all connected.

So great to have you here with us, Mayor Garcetti.

Thank you so much, Whitney.

Great to be with you.

And so, I mean, let's just, I think, dive right into it.

You know, as the mayor of one of the largest cities in the world,

you undoubtedly have a myriad of challenges and crises at any given moment that you're having to juggle.

And by becoming the chair of C40 cities,

you've kind of put a stake in the ground and put a spotlight on climate. So why do you think

it's really important for cities, yours and others, to really prioritize climate action right now?

Absolutely. So for the uninitiated, C40 is a network of mayors, founded by mayors a few years back,

and now it's 96 of the most populous metro areas in the world that account for about a quarter of the world's GDP.

So when you think about it, it's bigger than any country in terms of our GDP output.

More people are moving to cities than ever before.

A majority of humanity lives

in the urban environment, but it's a very diverse set of cultures and geographies and languages

with a common set of problems, which is that challenges, whether it's a pandemic or in this case,

climate crisis, really doesn't care about borders. They don't care about national borders.

They don't care about regional or state borders.

So this network is about mayors, kind of, there's an old saying that good mayors borrow,

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