Our Activities

The aim of the project is to develop an innovative, collaborative and circular systemic approach for regeneration and adaptive reuse of historic city centers. This will be implemented by implementing a repertoire of successful heritage-led regeneration initiatives. The project tests the replicability of the spatial approach and of successful models addressing the specific needs of historic city centres. ROCK delivers new ways to access and experience Cultural Heritage, ensuring environmentally-sound solutions, city branding, bottom-up participation via living labs, while increasing liveability and safety in the involved areas. Sensors and tools support the concrete application of ROCK principles and the platform will enable new ways to collect and exchange data to facilitate networking and synergies.

Through the Reflecting Cities project, ICLEI aims to provide African cities with spaces for reflection to assist them in engaging with the complex urban planning challenges they have identified. The project facilitates a number of exchanges to support urban planners (including representatives from national and local governments) in learning from the experiences of other cities, supported by experts. The project cities have each identified a case study of a complex planning topic with which they are currently wrestling The topics being explored include waste management, greening and traffic management. Based on the technical skills required for each case study, the project provides opportunities to engage with and learn from experts in relevant fields while benefiting from inter-city learning.

ICLEI East Asia and UNDRR co-hosted two workshops for two Chinese cities – Ningbo and Chengdu – to raise awareness of urban resilience with specific focuses on climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction among local officials.
The workshops were structured in sessions of concept and tools introduction, and presentations of international and domestic cases on resilience and adaptation. Assessments of local resilience were also conducted via group exercises followed by suggestions on improvements.
ICLEI East Asia and UNDRR will continue to work to support 2 more local governments in China in implementing the Sendai Framework and other urban resilience objectives via workshops. It is expected that local disaster risk reduction planning will be better risk-informed when cities are equipped with skills to assess their respective risks, identify gaps, and ultimately lead to projects to address those gaps. A learning publication will be produced as the final output of the series, to share lessons learned on improving urban resilience in the context of global warming with other cities.

Cities are growing and changing so fast that many authorities are struggling to cope. ICLEI’s aim is to boost sustainable urban development, through city-to-city International Urban Cooperation (IUC) on and foster sub-national actions under the Global Covenant of Mayors initiative. ICLEI supports regional innovation strategies and inter-regional cooperation for local and regional development.

ICLEI created a mobile app to educate homeowners and residents about the impacts of natural hazards and extreme weather, and how people can prepare for these events in their home.

Temperate is the next-generation, cloud-based adaptation planning software tool for cities and regional organizations, designed to support leaders in local government sustainability planning. With Temperate, ICLEI aims to guide users through exploring potential future climate hazards, creating a vulnerability assessment, and designing adaptation strategies that will help communities along the path toward climate resilience.

To assist SI-CAT in its efforts, ICLEI is compiling the best practices in urban resilience and adaptation programs/projects taking place outside of Japan. In 2017-18, ICLEI conducted a set of interviews with local governments worldwide, analyzing those practices and submitted reports which will be used to help researchers and local government officials to further develop understanding of urban resilience and thus contributing to the development of adaptation plans at local level. In 2019, ICLEI will research and compile examples of how local governments are utilizing and systematically managing scientific data in its resilience planning and in its adaptation programs/projects.

ICLEI supports the island cities by providing streamlined processes for assessing their risks and challenges and developing achievable action plans. It works side-by-side with the cities and assists them to find partners for action. ICLEI has been working with Honiara since 2016 to assist the City to undertake a disaster risk self assessment and action, using the Sendai Framework and scorecards, building capacity and supporting city leaders and staff to attend international events for peer-to-peer exchange and learning. There is now a strong understanding of disaster risk reduction among City staff and elected councilors, and an understanding of how disasters and climate change impact all the city development challenges. The ongoing project has led to strong partnerships between ICLEI, UNISDR, UN Habitat and academic professionals and institutions.

The IADAPT project addresses the water management issues in Indian cities, moving from existing water management practices that plan, establish and operate water supply, wastewater and storm water systems as separate entities to more integrated and collaborative approaches. ICLEI is helping two Indian cities – Solapur and Vijayawada to be climate resilient by developing an integrated catchment management plan guided by the decision support tool developed to move from conventional water management approaches to an ‘Integrated Approach’ based on the principles of IWRM and IUWM. The project will institutionalize climate adaptive water resource management at catchment level guided by participatory catchment planning, simple decision support tools, preparation of catchment level action plans and multi-pronged financing approaches.

ICLEI and its local partner International Climate Development Institute (ICDI) deliver three training events that teach local stakeholders how to improve resilience mechanisms under the UNISDR frameworks; how to ensure the life quality in order to achieve Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) from social, environmental and financial perspectives, by implementing the “Disaster resilience scorecard for cities;” and how to enhance and introduce new technology in DRR and resilience to start new business models in the related industry. The trainings include lectures and facilitation of group presentations and discussions.

In this action research project, ICLEI is providing support to four cities in developing collaboration mechanisms that advance climate resilient developmment, which can then be adapted to other contexts. The implementation of each country’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) via enhanced multi-level governance has been identified as an area of focus of this project. Through this project, ICLEI builds on the understanding of what enables collaboration mechanisms for climate resilient development, such as environments that allow for learning-by-doing and accumulation of knowledge that can be harnessed, local government officials who are engaged and passionate about building climate resilience, and cities where strong multi-sectoral partnerships exist. Building climate resilience is a multi-sectoral and multi-disciplinary issue, and therefore ICLEI promotes collaborative governance, which favours transdisciplinary collaborations that increase the depth and breadth of knowledge and expertise that can be drawn on when tackling complex issues such as climate resilience.

Through the Supporting African Cities Development of Climate Action Plans (CAPs) project, ICLEI Africa supported Moroni (Comoros) and Nacala (Mozambique) in becoming leading Africa cities in terms of climate mitigation and adaptation action planning as well as supporting these cities with continued compliancy to the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy (GCoM) initiative. Specifically, ICLEI is supported the cities in the development of Emissions Reduction Target Setting Reports and Climate Change Mitigation Action Plans under the GCoM mitigation reporting pathway; and co-developing Risk and Vulnerability Assessments and Climate Change Adaptation Action Plans under the GCoM adaptation reporting pathway for both cities.

When New York City announced intentions to divest city pension funds from fossil fuel reserve owners by 2022, the move positioned NYC at the center of the global divestment movement. Providing the first in-depth look at the steps NYC took to reach a divestment commitment, ICLEI’ s case study shows how the the largest municipal pension system in the United States has begun to divest billions of dollars from fossil fuels — and demonstrates to peer cities, large and small, that the principles and processes behind fossil fuel divestment are transferable to nearly any location where the will to divest exists.

ICLEI worked with Toronto Public Health to carry out research on strategies being used in other jurisdictions to manage extreme heat in older apartment buildings that don’t have air conditioning. The research included both a literature review and interviews with cities in North America and Europe. Eight key strategies were identified for managing extreme heat in Toronto apartment buildings, including active cooling, weatherization and insulation, increasing air circulation, reducing solar gain through windows, increasing natural ventilation, cooling/green/reflective external surfaces, minimizing internal heat generation and cooling on-site within the building.

ICLEI provides workshops that educate municipal governments on how to improve sustainable and resilient mechanisms under the UN frameworks, how to ensure the life quality in order to achieve sustainable development from social, environmental and financial perspectives, and how to enhance and introduce new technology in resilience to start a new business model in the related industry.