Washington, DC - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Michael R. Bloomberg, U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change, will welcome mayors from major global cities to the State Department at 12:30 p.m. on October 8 for the “Our Cities, Our Climate” working sessions and luncheon.

Secretary Kerry and Mr. Bloomberg will speak, and the international mayors from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Vancouver, Canada, and Yokohama, Japan, will participate in a panel on the topic of “Mayoral Perspectives on Fighting Climate Change” at 1:45 p.m.

The “Our Cities, Our Climate” initiative is a partnership between Bloomberg Philanthropies and the U.S. Department of State, bringing together mayors and city officials from around the world to discuss ways to work together to protect our planet.

The participants will share best practices, discuss solutions, and accelerate the progress that the world’s cities are making to address the global challenge of climate change, building climate-action momentum in the final weeks before December’s United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties in Paris (COP21).

International mayors are arriving from North Dhaka, Bangladesh; South Dhaka, Bangladesh; Mexico City, Mexico, and Lagos, Nigeria; as well as Rio de Janeiro, Vancouver, and Yokohama. Some of the U.S. mayors with a role in the initiative or who are attending the October 8 events include: Anchorage, Alaska; Orlando, Florida; Boulder, Colorado; Detroit, Michigan; Washington, D.C.; Boston, Massachusetts.

The international mayors are joined by city officials responsible for urban sustainability from around the world who arrived on the International Visitor Leadership Program. Through visits to San Francisco, Boston, and Washington, D.C., these officials are interacting with U.S. leaders in the environment and sustainability fields. The sustainability officials are from Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ethiopia, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.