ICLEI and the SCBD collaborated in preliminary consultations with Parties and selected subnational and local authorities on the need for implementation of NBSAPs by subnational governments. ICLEIwas tasked with guidelines for an integrated approach in the development and implementation of national, subnational and local biodiversity strategies and action plan and undertake capacity development.

The Guidelines provide detailed and comprehensive guidance on thirteen general areas for action to promote integration, coordination and cooperation, applicable to national, subnational and local levels of government. To develop the guidelines, ICLEI consulted with selected national and subnational governments; developed comparative analysis of their biodiversity strategies and action plans; presentated of the draft guidelines at CBD COP 13; and led capacity building workshops in Africa and India.

CITYFOOD accelerates local and regional government action on sustainable and resilient city-region food systems by combining networking with technical expertise through training and policy guidance and facilitating local and regional engagement in international discourse.

The network promotes food security, social inclusion, economic development and environmental resource management by combining networking with training, policy guidance and technical expertise on city-region food systems worldwide.

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.

International Smart and Sustainable Transport Workshop was jointly hosted by ICLEI, Intelligent Transportation Society of Taiwan (ITS Taiwan) and the Advanced Public Transportation Research Center at the National Taiwan University (APTRC), in Taipei, 11-13 April 2018.

The three day workshop brought together young professionals in the public service in Asia-Pacific to discuss the challenges commonly faced by cities in the region – sustainable urban mobility, smart public transport, intelligent transport technology, and traffic safety. The workshop was facilitated by transportation experts from the public and private sectors in Chinese Taipei as well as the ICLEI Sustainable Mobility team.

ICLEI coordinates the work on a comprehensive Outreach, Communication and Training Strategy for the ROBUST project. The strategy comprises training material for decision-makers in policy and the public sector. The specific objectives are:
To facilitate an effective communication and exchange with ROBUST’s principle target groups: 1) regional rural and urban policymakers, interest groups, and practitioners; 2) European and national policymakers, interest groups, and the general public; and 3) the research and scientific community.
To strengthen the communication and dissemination components of all WPs through common principles and a professional planning and implementation of all related activities.
To support all outreach, communication and dissemination through an interactive project website with Live Case Studies and a publication library.
To ensure a high quality of all project results and support related communications, as well as produce training modules for widespread dissemination and exploitation of ROBUST’s findings.

ICLEI was responsible on international policy processes. Through desk research, interviews and direct participation, ICLEI identified relevant political dynamics and processes regarding the rural-urban nexus in the context of HABITAT III (preparation and implementation) and the implementation of the SDGs. The aim is to identify ways through which the German federal government, and especially the Ministry for Environment and Building, can influence these processes in order to foster a global sustainable rural-urban nexus.
Part of the problem is that there is a limited understanding of the interconnections and hence development potential between urban and peri-urban areas due to an insufficient data base and lack of suitable indicators. That's why ICLEI collected fitting indicators out of a pool of (inter)national indicator sets and – in a second step – developed relevant indicators where needed. The indicators developed in the RUN project can serve as a starting point to better un-derstand these linkages and identify the most relevant data needed.

ICLEI leads the dissemination and communication. In this context a plan is delivered responding to the particularities of the rural areas, that are often “hard to reach” and both physically and technologically remote. The team engages with national and local independent production companies for television and radio broadcasts as internet use may not be available or widespread in all rural communities.
Furthermore, ICLEI supports local partners in developing their local plans through capacity building, including one local communication workshop and one local communication webinar to provide additional training.
ICLEI, together with UNESCO, enhances the link between RURITAGE and a wider community of interested parties at global level based in the mandate of sustainable development and performed by their networks. More precisely, ICLEI supports the cooperation with the countries covered by the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) by identifying key conferences and events where the RURITAGE Replication Tool Box can be disseminated.
Finally, ICLEI hosts a Dialogue Breakfast with European policy-makers in Brussels using the ICLEI Breakfast@Sustainability series.

ICLEI provides capacity building to target cities in implementing low emission development strategies as well as mainstreaming science-based disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation in local development processes.

The project utilizes the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN) Process toolkit, the Global Protocol for Community-scale Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories (GPC) in formulating the cities’ climate action and management plans, and USAID Clean Energy Emission Reduction (CLEER) Tool in assessing the cities’ vulnerabilities, risks, and emissions. Through these analyses, target cities will be able to mainstream climate change adaptation and mitigation principles in their local development plans.

The project ‘Urban-Rural Assembly’ (URA) aims to build a better understanding of the urban-rural constellation and interdependencies that are emerging along China’s vast urbanisation corridors, and which can no longer be described through traditional binaries of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’. The region Huangyan-Taizhou, part of the Chinese ‘prefectural-level city‘ Taizhou, will be examined as an exemplary case study and learning context: a rapidly urbanising region where diverse and seemingly contradictory transformation processes take place simultaneously in close proximity, producing multiple dimensions of urban-rural interrelations. URA combines leading partners in the field of sustainable urban and regional transformation in Germany and China. ICLEI supports the research project in creating an interface between the research partners and policy makers, both within the case region as well as nationally in China and internationally. Through the development of transferable strategic instruments, enabling tools and guidelines, the project seeks to foster knowledge dissemination and transfer across the coastal urbanisation corridor – contributing to the urgent need for creative approaches towards localisation and implementation of the SDGs and the New Urban Agenda in China and beyond.