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A New Roadmap for a Resilient Recovery in Ukraine

September 4, 2024

 

By Nuha Eltinay

Senior Expert, Urban Resilience and Climate Adaptation - ICLEI Europe

Katherine Peinhardt

Senior Expert Communications - ICLEI Europe

As Ukrainian cities continue to face the simultaneous challenges of a changing climate and an ongoing war, the question arises: How can short-term recovery be balanced with long-term resilience? In recent years, ICLEI Europe has focused on giving Ukrainian cities a platform to speak about their experiences, while also laying out a roadmap for recovery.

 

Ukrainian Cities' Voice at the European Urban Resilience Forum

 

In light of the Ukraine Crisis in September 2022, the 9th edition of the European Urban Resilience Forum (EURESFO) became a space to hear first-hand experiences from the Ukrainian cities of Irpin, Mariupol, Rivne and Vinnytsia. Since then, the conversation around Ukrainian cities’ recovery has grown to be a recurring focus area of EURESFO in 2023 and 2024. A unique space for knowledge-sharing between city representatives and key stakeholders, EURESFO has shone a spotlight on Ukrainian cities to discuss emergency response, governance amid continuous shocks and stresses, as well as a mutual development partnership between these cities and urban resilience networks across Europe.

 

However, there remains a growing lack of a coordinated vision to plan and implement post-war recovery and sustainable development initiatives across regional and international partners in Ukraine. To address this, EURESFO 2024 Ukraine Special Edition has been planned based on a new ICLEI Ukraine Roadmap. This Roadmap includes 20 Ukrainian cities as it works to develop a mechanism for local and regional stakeholder engagement, break investments out of restrictive “silos,” and move towards more strategic and sustainable actions.

 

The outcomes of this process were shared with the EURESFO 2024 audience, which included potential investors and donor organisations to foster business models, improve access to capital, and advance public-private partnership economic behaviour, while maintaining the value, management, and utility of municipal services and resources for sustainable post-war recovery.

ICLEI Ukraine Roadmap Background

 

Strengthening multi-level governance and engagement of key stakeholders at the national, local and regional levels, is critical in shaping the legal and financial enabling environment for effective and comprehensive project implementation. The ICLEI Ukraine Roadmap comes into place to help support the decentralised governance system in Ukraine, which has enabled numerous municipalities to uphold local public services and take on additional responsibilities to aid the war effort. The decentralised governance reform (that started in 2014 in Ukraine) -resulting in ‘the creation of 1469 amalgamated municipalities, the establishment of an elaborate multi-level regional development planning framework, as well as a significant increase in local public service delivery and public funding for regional and local development’ (OECD, 2022)- demonstrated the critical importance of building local human resources, administrative capacities, and service delivery to deal with the urgent needs of the war. These capacities will be equally crucial to employ during the immediate and long-term recovery phases, necessitating the development of additional skills to empower cities in fostering climate adaptation and resilience solutions, while enhancing the well-being of their citizens, ensuring harmonisation with climate neutrality plans and effective association with the EU Missions.

 

The Ukraine Roadmap forms an overarching framework for the ICLEI European Secretariat approach towards supporting Ukrainian cities in achieving their sustainability post-war recovery targets, while establishing the grounds towards realising the local context of war, governance decentralisation efforts, humanitarian response and energy security urgent needs, together with long-term opportunities for strategic Climate Neutrality, Adaptation and Resilient development in association with the European Green Deal (EU GD). Established in January 2024, the Roadmap activities were formed based on the monitoring of the current humanitarian situation in Ukraine -loss and damage associated with climate change hazards and vulnerabilities, and mapping of the existing initiatives and projects on the ground, to better understand the current context, what actions are taking place, by whom, where and what impact it is making on the ground. This helps better define the needs and priorities of Ukrainian cities and communities, and coordinate efforts between different actors through comprehensive urban recovery planning at the municipal, regional, and national levels.

 

The European Green Deal as driving force

 

The European Green Deal with its nine key topics: Preserving Biodiversity, Farm to Fork, Sustainable Agriculture, Clean Energy, Sustainable Industry, Buildings and Renovating, Sustainable Mobility, Eliminating Pollution and Climate action, comes as a driving force for formulating the structure and activities for this Roadmap. With the ambition for further development and promotion of the Local Green Deal (LGD) as an integrated sustainable urban development and transformation strategy for Ukrainian cities, the LGD will operate as a process for an ‘inside-out’ approach of mapping the existing initiatives and key stakeholders involved at the local level. This aims to define the main gaps in supply-led interventions, and help Ukrainian cities prioritise and best manage investments of European and International aid. Addressing the questions: Resilience of What and Resilience to What to direct financing towards enhancing their institutional capacities, advance human, physical, social and financial capital required to guide municipal services’ asset allocation, and into sustainable and resilient climate-adjusted long-term returns.

IMAGE: ICLEI Europe

 The ICLEI Ukraine Roadmap is aimed at achieving the following objectives:

 

1. To empower local self-government and multi-level decision-making, through providing cities with demand-driven advisory services on Sustainable planning, Resilience assessment & adaptive risk governance.
2. To operate as a city-to-city Knowledge Platform, to help exchange good practices between Ukrainian and EU cities, share expertise, and provide technical assistance for Reconstruction Recovery to build back better.
3. To help implement Ukrainian cities and communities’ vision and strategies, through coordination between key actors, joint financing applications, and technical assistance for project procurement.

 

European Alliance of cities and regions for the reconstruction of Ukraine

 

Joining the European Alliance of Cities and Regions for the Reconstruction of Ukraine by early 2023, helped align ICLEI efforts towards developing the Roadmap into the Alliance's key principles that extend from promoting the shift from financing by project to financing by programme, mobilising integrated resilience recovery and building capacity within Ukraine cities, to forming networks for knowledge sharing with European cities, and developing mid-to-long term solutions to support Ukraine's territorial integrity and sovereignty, with the empowerment of local self-government and decentralisation mechanisms. The European Charter of Local Self-Government is also considered in line with the (Ukrainian) State Regional Development Strategy 2021-2027, and its planned review and evolution, as well as on the existing decentralisation framework in Ukraine. This was accompanied by the organisation of the Online Webinar on ‘The role of digitalisation in emergency response and post-war recovery’ as part of the MCR2030 Digital Resilience webinar series in January 2023.

 

ICLEI Ukraine Roadmap Activities

 

Aimed at empowering and preparing local and regional Ukrainian authorities for embarking on European cities' experiences and transformational journeys towards climate neutrality and adaptation in line with the EU Green Deal, the eight key steps of the Ukraine Roadmap were formulated to help take stock of the existing knowledge and research findings to date. This paves the way for supporting Ukrainian cities in formulating their local green deals, improving access to capital and advancing public-private partnership economic behaviour, while maintaining the value, management and utility of municipal services and resources for sustainable post-war recovery and resilience decentralisation efforts.

 

To help develop a constructive approach to the engagement of Ukrainian cities in the development of ICLEI Roadmap activities, three online workshops were organised with 19 Ukrainian cities in March, April, and May 2024 in the run-up to the 2024 edition of EURESFO. The findings of the workshops were shared with the panellists of the panel discussion at the conference, to reflect on the cities defined urgent needs and demands for plans for developing their Local Green Deals (LGDs), under three key thematic areas: Energy Efficiency, Sustainable Reconstruction and Socio-economic Recovery. At EURESFO Andriy Ocheretny, Deputy Mayor of Vinnytsia (Ukraine) highlighted: “Every city is facing different challenges, depending on their location. Expenses have increased in the cities after the war. We work towards developing strategies with a view of EU integration as a part of making our cities more resilient”.

 

This first online workshop took place in March 2024, and was conducted with 19 Ukrainian cities (Brovary, Boyarka, Chornomorsk, Horishni, Kremenchuk, Konotop, Korosten, Lviv, Mykolaiv, Nikopol, Novomoskovsk, Ochakiv, Ostroh, Ovruch, Plavni, Shostka Kryvyi, Sursko-Lytovske, Svitlovodsk, and Vinnytsia) and key partnering organisations (BDO, SEVEn, and UNDRR/NURI) on March 2024. Needs, challenges and opportunities for Ukrainian cities were mapped and defined across the major impacts of the war identified by the cities, and the Ambitions, priorities, and planned projects taking place and planned for both humanitarian response and long-term recovery were discussed. This information served to map the current situation of Ukrainian cities and guide the discussion around key priorities to be identified for financial investments.

 

Representatives from the listed cities were encouraged to express the main challenges that their city is facing, in the context of the current conflict situation. The focus was on specifically three key sectors at the cities’ strategic level and sustainable recovery: energy sector, reconstruction and socioeconomics. Each city has been affected by the war in different ways, with various factors being in place (geographical location, level of vulnerability, etc.). Common challenges for many cities included blackouts/power outages caused by shellings or attacks to the energy infrastructure, contamination of air, soil and water due to the military attacks, limited access to drinking water, and partial damage and/or destruction of residential buildings, businesses, educational and cultural heritage, and various types of infrastructure (energy, water, transport, etc.). Focus on improving the environmental situation was indicated, by applying nature-based solutions for cleaning up rivers and lakes, and reducing in the consumption of energy resources to minimise CO2 emissions.

 

The suspension of small and medium-sized businesses was also indicated as a major challenge, together with the socio-economic impact of internal displacement. The financing of social projects was indicated as a priority to provide mental health services in rehabilitation centres and help reduce the distribution of education by providing maintenance for shelters and schools.

 

Following the discussions, the second workshop was organised in April 2024, aiming to analyse Ukrainian cities’ project portfolios and financial investment priorities shared on the DREAM Platform. Focused on only 14 cities with publicly published information on the DREAM Platform, there are a total of 278 projects, with an overall estimated budget of 21.9 billion euros. However, only one-quarter of the projects have already been covered financially. The analysis provided information on the number of projects per city, types of projects, status of the projects and the funding type and financing parties. The findings indicated that education projects are well-funded, but other sectors face significant challenges in attracting investment.

 

Building on the findings from Workshops 1 and 2, the third workshop explored the key steps required for Ukrainian cities to develop their LGDs., Local and international actors shared experiences from existing projects from DRESO, UNDP, CDP and the German Energy Agency (DENA), to help cities replicate solutions and identify relevant actions. The session focused on building trust among local partners, appointing a team to manage and coordinate LGDs, and advancing climate governance towards adaptive and climate-neutral policies and ecosystems.

 

 

 

At the 11th edition of EURESFO, celebrated in the city of Valencia (Spain) in June 2024, a series of three parallel city workshops took place, This Roadmap activities aimed to support Ukrainian cities to meet the objectives of the European Green Deal; while establishing a framework to help them integrate humanitarian response and short-term actions into their development of climate-neutral long-term recovery, resilience, climate adaptation solutions and sustainable reconstruction. Further investigation of the legislative framework and decentralisation policy reforms of Ukrainian cities will take place to understand the context and develop demand-driven, citizen-oriented innovative solutions. Adopting the EU Smart Cities and Adaptation Missions Frameworks will help enhance cities' understanding of conflict fragility short- and long-term impacts, while defining asset losses and exposure to climate hazards, and exploring opportunities for advancing existing climate strategies. Through the Roadmap, ICLEI Europe supports and advocates for improved access to funding for local and regional governments in Ukraine, to help learn lessons from existing climate financing tools and solutions developed in EU cities, while opening the door for access to funding, and working closely with organisations such as the European Investment Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the Council of Europe Development Bank (CEB) to develop new financing schemes, tailored to the investment needs and budgetary reality of local and regional governments in Ukraine. Bridging the advancing EU Missions’ current tools and cross-regional knowledge transfer services in a more systematic approach. The Roadmap aims to better integrate the EU Green Deal climate adaptation and mitigation principles into Ukraine’s post-war recovery efforts, through adopting measures for data governance, standardisation and decision-making monitoring and evaluation. It also calls for transparent climate-aligned reporting with the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) framework, and providing the capacities required for Ukrainian cities to advance on reporting their climate change physical and transition risks, monitoring plans, actions and impact to improve the quality of urban environment, and manage the impact of war destruction and biodiversity waste led environmental degradation.

 

These and many more discussions about the topic of the reconstruction of Ukraine are expected to be discussed at the European Conference on Sustainable Cities and Towns in Aalborg (Denmark), from 1-3 October 2024, which will mark the next step for the Roadmap.