ICLEI builds four Heritage Innovation Partnerships (HIPs). Each convened by a local partner and involving stakeholders from a range of organisations, including conservation organisations, community groups, local businesses engaged working alongside the research teams. The HIPs provide input into the development, analysis and outputs of the project.
ICLEI further produces a final report on the value added and use of HIPs to advance the adaptive reuse of cultural heritage.
In addition, ICLEI leads the Peer-Review Process among the four partnerships for overcoming existing problems, by building an understanding of the issues, situations and challenges and exploring new ideas, options and solutions. To enhance knowledge exchange between partnerships, city visits are set up. The fvisits aim to facilitate the transfer knowledge especially for what concerns decision making, implementation, governance, business models and advance the exploration of adaptive re-use of cultural heritage.
Finally ICLEI will be responsible for the overall coordination of all implementation and review activities and takes a role as ‘external coach’ for each implementing partnership.

ICLEI promotes the implementation of short-lived climate pollutant reduction strategies by mobilizing and empowering the health sector and demonstrating the full range of health benefits that can be achieved at the city level. A significant transformation in the current trajectory of air and climate pollutant emissions requires increased engagement, commitment and action at the global, regional, national and local levels. Health arguments can be a powerful incentive and driver for such action, in particular on the city level, where benefits of local policy change translate directly to health benefits among the local population.

ICLEI USA partnered with Azavea, a beneficial corporation and software developer in Philadelphia and Dr. Missy Stultz, a former ICLEI USA staff member to create TEMPERATE to help local governments with limited resources to develop climate change adaptation plans and align those plans with the reporting requirements of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy. The Temperate dashboard displays city-specific potential future climate hazards, based on the geographic regions and findings included in the 2014 National Climate Assessment. Each Top Hazard is backed by one of the Climate indicators available in the Azavea Climate API, informed by Dr. Stultz's research. ICLEI USA provides 2-6 hours of Temperate support to its members. ICLEI USA contracts with cities that wish to outsource the Vulnerability Assessment development, as was the case with the Town and Village of New Paltz New York. Over a two-year period, ICLEI USA staff worked with the Town and stakeholders to develop an action plan to address local climate vulnerabilities.

Through this project, ICLEI as a leading member of the implementing consortium leads the work package set up to help enhance institutional frameworks through political advocacy and networking. ICLEI leads the project’s support to address legal and institutional frameworks and promote multilevel governance in pilot countries to provide an enabling environment for local and national governments to coordinate and streamline their urban planning and relevant priority sector activities. To this end, ICLEI establishes dialogues (including Talanoa dialogues) and explores partnerships and networking opportunities with political leaders at all levels and leveraging on its role as focal point to the Local Governments and Municipal Authorities (LGMA) constituency of the UN Climate Change and the Friends of Cities group.

ICLEI also provides technical expertise to the local governments in the development of their Sustainable Energy Access and Climate Action Plans (SEACAPs); supports the project’s work to enhance local climate finance and supports the project’s communication and awareness raising activities.

The Covenant of Mayors in Sub-Saharan Africa supports Sub-Saharan African cities to tackle the interconnected challenges of climate change and access to sustainable energy. Started in 2015, CoM SSA is the African regional chapter of the Global Covenant of Mayors (GCoM), the largest network of cities driving urban climate action.
CoM SSA provides broad-scale technical support to signatory cities through a Technical Helpdesk housed at ICLEI Africa, in Cape Town. At least 25 of these cities are provided with tailored technical support to develop and implement Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plans (SEACAPs).
As the initiative matures, the focus moves from planning to implementation and more specifically on unlocking climate finance at the local level. Implementing partners facilitate dialogue with private sector and finance institutions, link signatory cities with relevant initiatives for funding, facilitate inter-government dialogue on climate finance and co-ordinate action between international commitments, Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

ICLEI is convening a circular economy workshop to bring stakeholders and experts from African cities together. Through a combination of short presentations and interactive sessions, the workshop will (1) build shared understanding of the concepts of circular development, resource nexus and urban metabolism, as well as their application in urban African contexts; (2) familiarise participants with useful tools and portals for analysing city resource performance; (3) show evidence of these principles in action in Accra; (4) identify city needs related to urban resource management, and (5) collectively chart a way forward for building communities of practice around sustainable urban resource management in African cities.

The Connecting Nature front-runner cities will draw on their experiences and work with fast-follower cities in a capacity-building role. The project will expand upon existing urban sustainability and innovation initiatives, create a reference framework of clear and useful indicators for the implementation and evaluation of nature-based solutions, build expertise and competency in all cities for innovative urban planning, policy and solution implementation, generate economic opportunities for a diversity of urban actors in Europe, and nurture urban community support, idea creation, active stakeholder participation and idea implementation at local levels and expansion and replication at a global level, through the global reach of ICLEI. The ICLEI European Secretariat will, through its regional offices in East Asia, South Korea and Brazil, in collaboration with local partners in these regions, work on drawing down matching regional funding and establish local Connecting Nature linked initiatives that will adapt and embed mechanisms for the co-production of solutions in those locations and cities.

ICLEI established a replicable framework that can be used by local governments throughout the country to attribute the observed changes in community GHG emissions inventories. Practitioners within cities and counties are now able to harness data to produce a more accurate depiction in changes to community-scale efficiency, communicate those trends more clearly, and use the data to evaluate the effectiveness of policies and programs. The project components are development of the Contribution Analysis methodology; application of the techniques of Contribution Analysis to a range of community types to illustrate the drivers of change in various communities; production of a “replication toolkit” which clearly describes the steps in the process, provides guidance and templates for additional communities to adopt and take forward; and distrbution of these new resources widely.

Recognizing that cities play an important role in leading the way to achieve carbon neutrality in the second half of this century, namely the goals of the Paris Agreement, ICLEI supports cities and regions laying out their vision on a sustainable society in 2050. The declaration lays out a vision for cities leading up to 2050 and encourages cities around the world to join Kyoto in cultivating a culture of sustainable cities that is in balance with the local and global environment.

Innovative research has been undertaken by ICLEI in Blantyre, Gaborone and Harare to enhance understanding of the influence of people’s perceptions and values during their interpretation of climate risk narratives.