ICLEI aims to increase the capacity of change makers, civil society and organizations to contribute to more just, sustainable and resilient futures. ICLEI offer academic and professional education on the theory and practice of transformative societal change, by facilitating peer-to-peer learning processes between 15 frontrunner cities and twice as many other cities within Europe.

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 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 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.

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.

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.