Cities fostering low-emission development across the globe join a European study trip

October 28, 2019

By Alexandra Pfohl, ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability

International city delegation participating in the Urban-LEDS II project study trip

IMAGE: ICLEI Europe

Taking visiting cities on a tour through its “smart Kalasatama” neighbourhood, the city showcased how it transfers strategies like “Climate-Smart Helsinki” into practice. The area is the first model area for a smart energy system in Finland, hosting not only the largest solar power plant in the country, but also providing smart energy storage, eco-efficient district cooling and harbours a smart remote-controlled transformer substation, a fault-tolerant ring network and an electric car network.

The stay highlighted the opportunities that can arise for cities and their citizens from implementing low-emission alternatives across sectors and in neighbourhoods, such as increased liveability, innovation and entrepreneurship. A topic closely linked to the role of citizens for an effective emission reduction. “Citizens must be engaged in what is the challenge of addressing climate change. Municipalities are important to bring them on board, and so are all those associations and organisations that work to empower citizens and to improve general knowledge about climate change,” said Valentina Orioli, Bologna’s Deputy Mayor for Urban Planning, Real Estate, Environment, Preservation and Renewal of the Historic City.

Faced with a steep individual motorisation rate of 53 vehicles per 100 inhabitants, and a significant large historic and privately owned building stock (~34% of CO2 emissions from the residential sector), private stakeholder decision making is an important factor for Bologna’s emission reduction plans. Consequently, the city is exploring public-private partnership and other engagement models to make citizens responsible stakeholders for the sustainable development of their neighbourhoods. Within the Fondazione Innovazione Urbana, Bologna’s citizens are encouraged to develop ideas and projects addressing the social, technological and sustainable transformation of their city. With the public-private partnership based Kilowatt initiative set up between the city, the Emilia-Romagna region and private stakeholders, the city has found a way to stimulate job opportunities and social inclusion, while regenerating the public greenhouses in the Giardini Margherita, in a socially and environmentally friendly way.

The potential synergies between adapting to climate change and strengthening the social fabric and attractiveness of a city was apparent when touring the regenerated Vistula riverbank. The project is one of Warsaw’s biggest urban regeneration projects to prevent damage to technical infrastructure from the projected varying water flows of the river in coming years. The new, several kilometres long riverside boulevard will increase mobility between different city quarters in the future and provide easy access to additional recreational spaces for citizens.

Overlooking Warsaw

IMAGE: ICLEI Europe

Having put the last touches to the Warsaw Adaptation Strategy, approved only days after the Urban-LEDS visit and developed in a three-year participatory process, Warsaw experts shared fresh experiences with the strategy’s development, evaluation and target identification process with their peers.

The South-South-North joint learning processes and exercises generated during the working discussions, as well as the examples from host cities, will feed into the low-emission development strategies to be developed within the Urban-LEDS project. Highlighting the benefits of the direct exchange, Alice Umuhorakeye, Environmental Protection officer at the city of Kigali (Rwanda) concluded that “it is through demonstration projects and study tours like this, where we can study and learn from the experiences of other cities. They are an important part of capacity building to address the different challenges cities are facing.”

The international delegation took the impressions and lessons learned during the trip to their concluding session at the 10th edition of the Resilient Cities conference in Bonn (Germany).

Peer-to-peer exchanges, advocacy and tailor-made guidance and capacity building will continue in the next months to accelerate climate action. Drawing amongst others on ICLEI’s GreenClimateCities (GCC) methodology, the project is set to facilitate the development of low-emission development strategies in Urban-LEDS II cities across the globe. The trip was organised by UN-Habitat and the ICLEI European Secretariat.

For more information on the study trip and short video introduction to the Urban-LEDS II project visit here:

www.urban-leds.org