Our Activities

ICLEI facilitated and trained two groups of municipalities and stakeholders: Training-the-Trainers and Collaborative Implementation Groups. The former worked with 18 communities across the Great Lakes watershed to better understand their local climate impacts and risks. The project helped municipalities convene local workshops to learn how to use climate change modelling data and identify local vulnerabilities, assess and prioritize their risks, and begin developing adaptation plans. The latter worked with 12 communities to move from planning to action on local resilience by identifying implementation ready adaptation initiatives, securing funding for the initiatives, documenting key lessons learned via a case-study series, and leveraging future activities to support the actual implementation of local initiatives.

For a decade, the annual ICLEI Resilient Cities Congress has been providing an open, global space where local governments, researchers, businesses and civil society could meet as equals, contributing with their knowledge and expertise to the advancement of urban resilience. With up to 500 participants and more than 30 partners each year, Resilient Cities is a milestone event where ICLEI engages local, national and global decision makers, adaptation experts and city staff to assess global resilience indicators and forge new partnerships to advance resilient urban development.

While many island urban settlements are growing rapidly, climate change and increasingly frequent disasters are stressing urban systems. ICLEI promotes sustainable island and urban development through resilience and systems planning, clean energy, coastal fisheries management, infrastructure, innovative finance, ecosystems services, post disaster recovery and sustainable tourism. ICLEI collaborates with Mayors and leaders, through twinning of island cities with other cities and regions, to create fruitful partnerships to deliver scalable solutions to build resilience on islands and globally.

This workshop focused on exploring solutions, technology and applications on building a more resilient and water smart city by a series of indoor lectures, technical visits and group presentations. The target participants include government officials, executives, and research and development personnel responsible for the water management and technical implementation. Experts from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, New Zealand, Australia and Netherlands shared their expertise with representatives from fifteen countries.

ICLEI initiated and continues to promote the uptake of the Basque Declaration, which was adopted by the participants of the 8th European Conference on Sustainable Cities and Towns in April 2016. The Basque Declaration outlines new pathways for European Cities and Towns to create productive, sustainable and resilient cities for a livable and inclusive Europe. The declaration aims to support and accelerate socio-cultural, socio-economic and technological transformation.

Through the Future Resilience for African CiTies And Lands (FRACTAL) project, local governments in sub-Saharan Africa adopt a model of inclusive climate research and action, effectively bridging the divide between science and policy by responding to city identified challenges with the co-development of relevant climate information. The targeted Southern African local governments participate in city consultations – called Learning Labs – to facilitate knowledge sharing and generation, learning, networking and policy advice. The cities are also exposed to training (at political and technical levels), partnership development and co-production of robust and scale relevant climate information. FRACTAL has established new methodologies for improved collaboration and innovative transdisciplinary research by integrating across disciplines, nations, sectors, and between academia and society. This collaboration is rooted in Africa through effective partnerships between individuals and organisations, and between participants in Africa and elsewhere. This new approach to fundamental climate research is strongly framed by the information needs required for context relevant African societal decisions.

ICLEI, through the AfriAlliance project, aims to support existing networks in identifying and sharing social innovations and technological solutions for key water and climate challenges. Capitalising on existing and emerging knowledge and innovation in Africa and the EU, ICLEI supports this process by contributing to the development of a social innovation database for water and climate solutions covering the following aspects: governance, capacity development, business development and technology. ICLEI also contributes to the development of project outputs such as policy briefs, social innovation factsheets, roadshows and innovation bridge events, as well as MOOCs. We also work on communication and visibility of the project, and building relationships between partners and their networks, raising awareness of the water related challenges, and opportunities related to climate change impacts with proposed adaptation measures.

One of the main scientific problems for understanding southern Africa’s climate is that different models give contradictory scenarios for climate trends over the next 5–40 years. Through a transdisciplinary learning approach and scientific research, ICLEI contributes to an improved understanding of climate processes, and regional and local climate trends that drive the southern African climate system’s natural variability and responses to change within that system. ICLEI addresses the challenge of providing accessible, timely, applicable and defensible climate information that is needed by decision-makers operating at the city regional scale.

Established in 2010, CDKN is a demand-led network that helps developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean to achieve climate compatible development goals. Through this project, CDKN is shifting from knowledge generating and technical assistance to knowledge brokering. It endeavours to get the right information to the right people and create an enabling environment for implementation and scaling climate and development actions in order to drive inclusive, sustainable and climate resilient development, and enhance the quality of life for the poorest and most vulnerable to climate change. ICLEI’s role is to facilitate knowledge brokering through making information and learning on climate compatible development easier to access and use for the Asia region.

Working with local and subnational governments, ICLEI develops and implements smart procurement programmes and city-to-city networks to strategically support these governmenta to build capacity and engage with stakeholders (both local and provincial government and private sector) to implement and embed sustainable procurement practices in Africa.