Insurance companies urging cities to implement Agenda 21

Sioux Falls represents the chemical toilet as a member of Local Governments for Sustainability; Missoula, Helena, and Bozeman are signatory in Montana. Member cities in New Mexico are: Silver City, Taos, Las Cruces, Santa Fe, Cimarron, Los Alamos and Albuquerque.

Kiyotaka Akasaka is the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information. Here is a snip from his essay in the Huffington Post:

The Earth Summit marked a milestone with agreement by more than 178 countries on Agenda 21, the visionary blueprint for sustainable development. The attacks on Agenda 21 are remarkably similar to the full-throated climate change denial movement that has seriously impeded progress on that issue.

Risk analysts and actuaries are warning cities about their responsibilities to prepare for the effects of global warming. David Fogarty and Deborah Zabarenko write in Reuters:

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said all nations will be vulnerable to the expected increase in heat waves, more intense rains and floods and a probable rise in the intensity of droughts. Aimed largely at policymakers, the report, and an additional summary of its contents, makes clear nations need to act now, because increasingly extreme weather is already a trend. The report’s release dovetailed with an unprecedented March heat wave in the continental United States and a London conference where scientists warned the world was nearing tipping points that would make the planet irreversibly hotter.

The Big Sioux River watershed was recently cited as one of the most impaired waterways in the Upper Missouri Basin: pollutants originating in Sioux Falls contribute about half of the river's contaminants which flow unmitigated into the Missouri River then on to Gulf of Mexico where a Dead Zone threatens to spread to the entire Caribbean.

Is it time for a United Nations intervention in South Dakota?