It has become clearly evident that in the post-COVID world, we would have to evolve our understanding and perspective about cities and urban services. There should be no doubt that local governments as well as State and National Governments need to find robust and resilient developmental models through cross-learning from peers. The answer could be to identify best practices in low-carbon solutions and to try contextualising and internalising them in planning and implementation processes. Through its various initiatives, ICLEI South Asia has been supporting local governments and other stakeholders to continue their progression towards a resilient pathway and resource efficiency.

To help disseminate knowledge from Nagpur city’s actions to advance building energy efficiency under the Building Efficiency Accelerator (BEA) project, ICLEI South Asia is helping the Nagpur Municipal Corporation and the Nagpur Smart and Sustainable City Development Corporation Limited (NSSCDCL) to prepare knowledge products that can be used at the local level and regionally.  A set of five factsheets has been prepared based on Nagpur’s recently developed city-specific ‘Technical Guidelines for Energy Efficient and Climate Responsive Homes’. The factsheets will help to communicate key information and recommendations from the guidelines to various stakeholders such as city officials, architects, real estate developers, and homeowners. A case study is also being finalised to help cities and stakeholders in India and the region learn more about the outcomes and practical experiences from energy benchmarking carried out in Nagpur’s public and commercial buildings. Two training modules, based on Nagpur’s Technical Guidelines for homes and on its building energy benchmarking activity, can be readily used for sensitising stakeholders.

Meanwhile, ICLEI South Asia has also continued to support the capacity building of the stakeholders. Due to limitations on organising in-person workshops, the ICLEI South Asia team explored online platforms and successfully conducted three webinars under the aegis of the Asia LEDS Partnership project.

#1 Economic Recovery and Long-Term Visioning for the Power Sector Transformation, the 30^th of  June 2020: This new support area, launched under the Grid-scale Renewable Energy (GRE) Community of Practice (CoP), would work with countries on the development of more ambitious, longer-term visions for the power sector’s transformation. The development of such plans will support countries in considering the long-term implications of economic recovery and stimulus programmes and, where desired, the visions can be fully integrated with recovery efforts. This webinar served as an opportunity to discuss this new support area and its future implementation in one or two countries in the region. India’s work on long-term power sector planning and economic recovery actions was also highlighted during the webinar. Watch here

#2 Financing Solutions for Improved Building Efficiency in Cities, the 14^th of July 14 2020: The second webinar in the series, organised under the Building Energy Efficiency (BEE) Community of Practice (CoP), focused on financing solutions and related measures that cities, particularly the ones in the Asian region, can adopt to support efficiency improvements locally. Financing options along with case-studies (including learnings and experiences) were discussed in the webinar. Watch here

#3 Energy Benchmarking to realize improved Energy Efficiency in Buildings, the 1^st of September 2020:– the third webinar under the BEE CoP highlighted opportunities that energy benchmarking offers to cities to advance building efficiency. Experiences and insights from benchmarking efforts from the region, including India, China, and Indonesia, were shared with participants to support the replication of similar initiatives. Watch here

Through its knowledge partnership with the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA), the CapaCITIES project is engaging with the Climate Centre for Cities (C-Cube) instituted at the NIUA by the Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs (MoHUA) to disseminate the climate actions in eight partner cities and the knowledge products developed by its team to other cities in India. The project will support all partner cities and smart cities in the states of Tamil Nadu and Gujarat in responding to the CSCAF 2.0. The CapaCITIES project is also supporting Rajkot and Udaipur in their activities under the Cycle4Change Challenge initiative of the Smart Cities Mission, MoHUA.