Transcript: Mayor Eric Adams Makes an Announcement With London Mayor Sadiq Khan

May 9, 2022

Mayor Eric Adams: Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. And we are joined today with Mayor Sadiq Khan. If you haven't realized it, he is from London, he's here to do a tour and visit New York, tourism. We just were talking about it, going out to San Francisco to look at technology, going to look at other areas of the city and country to attract New Yorkers to come visit London and also to look at some of our businesses that we have here. So he and I are going to be in a friendly competition. And here in New York, when I leave the city, they criticize me, probably in London they encourage you to explore.

Mayor Adams: If you are a mayor that only stands on your block, you are not going to solve the problems of the globe, and I'm not going to do that to New York, and those who don't understand that the way goes a city goes goes the entire globe, and we better start thinking globally if we want to solve global problems. And the mere fact that we have this amazing mayor from London that gets it. That's why he's in America. What he learns here, he's going to take back to his city and use it to lift up his city. So when I'm in Los Angeles, I'm there to learn. When I go to London, I'm going to learn. When I go to other parts of the globe, I'm going to learn. This is an international city, like London is an international city, and you don't need a domestic thinking mayor to run an international city. You need an international thinking mayor to run an international city and I'm really happy to be here with an international thinking mayor, Mayor Khan.

Mayor Adams: And because of that, we are moving in a uniform direction. We have a lot of work to do going forward to get our cities back on track. Two years of COVID, over two years of COVID, both our cities have gone through traumatic experiences from the economic recovery to climate change and public health, New York and London are working to move our cities forward. And we're proud to be part of the C40 Cities Group, chaired by Mayor Khan. We get many mayors in this city, every week there's a new mayor here, but there was a bit of energy with you coming in here. As among the mayors, you like the rockstar of mayors. People were excited, my team was excited to see you and we see what you're doing.

Mayor Adams: C40 is doing a phenomenal job on moving the world largest population centers in the right direction. The future is based on cities, not national governments. What we do here, we're the closest to the problems. And what happens in our countries will be based on what happens in our cities. And today we're taking a big step forward and we are announcing today that New York City will be signing onto C40's Good Food Cities Declaration. Now it's going to take a moment before people really understand the significance of what we are doing, but this is a crucial step in the direction of improving our environment and improving our health. When I advocated for this, when I was Brooklyn borough president, I talked about it, people thought it was impossible. Whenever we talk about our environment, we only talk about carbon emissions from vehicles and carbon emission from buildings, but we need to go further if we are serious about our environment.

Mayor Adams: This is about promises made and promises kept. We're committing to a future where city dwellers have access to sustainable, nutritious, and delicious food. And that as little as possible go to waste, little as possible will go to waste. That's crucial for our environment. We're continuing to look at how do we get this accomplished in a real way by committing to a future of real possibilities around healthy food and healthy planet. We must work towards a food system that is a good food system for people and the planet, we have not done that in the past. Our cities with their density and mass transit opportunities and options, already allow people to live a more sustainable way and a more sustainable life, but we can do more and finding ways to measure our impact will help us get there in a real way.

Mayor Adams: That is why we are also announcing a new project being underwritten by American Express, Good Corporate Community Partnership. Together, we will be developing innovative new emission inventories for London and New York City. This initiative will pioneer new ways for our cities to calculate and reduce emission from urban consumptions, including the food we eat, often left out of the conversation. How we deliver our food, the food we eat, how we raise our food is contributing to our environmental crisis. This is the first step towards bringing food, construction materials, and consumer goods into our decarbonization strategies. Never been done before, we are doing it for the first time, London and New York City.

Mayor Adams: This has never been done before, as I stated, and will give us a valuable tool to make better plans and find bigger solutions. By building data inventories in partnership with businesses like supermarket change and retailers, we can better focus our efforts to create a more sustainable way of life and develop additional tools in our fight against climate change. A real partnership. Addressing the impact of food consumption is a personal passion for me. I have talked about this for years. It's in our food. Not only is our food harming our mothers and fathers, but it's harming mother nature. And it's time for us to be honest about this conversation and unafraid of where the facts take us.

Mayor Adams: I want to thank the C40 Cities Group, Mayor Khan, and mayors around the globe for helping advance this critical issue. Our real cities, our real futures. If we don't get it right in our cities, we're not going to get it right in our countries. And leaders of cities all over the globe are committed to working together to build a better, healthier, and more sustainable future. And so I am really pleased to have an amazing mayor in the city of London, a person that many of us look up to. He's a visionary, he sees the possibility of the future, and I cannot wait as he has come to show the attractiveness of London and we are going to have a nice, friendly competition. I'm going to get more Londoners to New York than you would get New Yorkers to London, but we really thank you. You are well known here in this city and it gives us a great honor to have you here in New York. And I hope you had an enjoyable stay and we welcome you back as often as possible. We just have one request, spend money, spend money. Mayor Khan.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan: Can I just say, thank you very much to Eric, the mayor of New York. Can I begin by congratulating you Eric and your fantastic election campaign last year? We watched with excitement, the energy you brought to the campaign, your fantastic victory as well in November. We were just speaking before we came in and Eric and I were comparing notes, we both said how proud we were to represent these two great cities. And I got to say, though Eric, I think you've got the second best job in politics being the mayor of New York. I, of course, have the best job in politics being the mayor of London.

Mayor Khan: But listen, our two cities are kindred souls and kindred spirits, so we share so much. We are arguably the only two truly global cities. We have in common our energy, our innovation, our creativity, how we're constantly evolving, but also we're turning challenges into opportunities. And I saw during your campaign, you talking passionately about the power of food, good food to help individuals. But by you signing the declaration today, you're trying to explain to New Yorkers, as we've tried to do in London, the connection between what we eat in relation to our personal wellbeing and the planet's.

Mayor Khan: And I want to thank you, as chair of C40. For those that don't know, C40 is the network of 97 mega cities across the globe from New York to London, from Madrid to Buenos Aires, from Dakar to Freetown, and we're working together to tackle climate change. And Eric's right though, to remind me and to remind you all, we've got a big job ahead of us after the last two years. We've lost lives. We've lost livelihoods. And I'm here in New York unashamedly banging the drum for London, banging the drum for Americans to come to our great city as tourists, as students to invest, to do business, and vice versa. Eric, we'll be making sure the Londoners know it's time for New York City.

Mayor Khan: This year, we are celebrating Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II's 70th year on the throne. We are having Platinum Jubilee celebrations. I've managed to persuade Her Majesty to lend me some of her Coldstream Guards, the oldest infantry in the British Army. Their job is to protect the Queen. They'll be with me shortly in Times Square to give you a flavor of some of the things you can enjoy in London this year. We've also got great actors and singers from the musical, Six, who will be in Times Square this morning in one of the greatest squares in the world, encouraging Americans to come to London.

Mayor Khan: Let me just end by saying this to the media watching this, I would say genuinely, being the mayor of a global city after a pandemic is an incredibly tough, tough job. If you are mayor of a global city like New York or London, you've got to build friendships and build partnerships and build connections, and I'll make sure, Eric, I take back with me to London your very kind invitation for Londoners to come to New York to enjoy your fantastic city. I was out last night, spending money in your shops. It's good to see the hustle and the bustle as well and I'm really grateful, Eric, for the beginning of a friendship between you and I and we will carry on this special relationship that the two greatest cities in the world, New York and London, have.

Mayor Khan: Eric, thanks for having me.

Mayor Adams: Thank you.

Mayor Khan: And I wish you all the best over the next few years.

Mayor Adams: Thank you. Thank you.

Mayor Khan: Cheers.

Mayor Adams: Do appreciate that.

###