Our Activities

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 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 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 leads the general dissemination effort of OpenHeritage, with a particular focus on reaching out to local authorities all over Europe, leveraging its vast municipality network with the policy and academia connections of the consortium as a whole.
ICLEI also contributes to the Observatory Cases, and to the Cooperative Heritage Labs, collecting and synthesizing information.

ICLEI Europes task within this activity is to validate, enrich and share SONNET results, maximising their exploitation and impact, drawing upon a well-designed knowledge brokerage and co-creation process within and beyond the project. It implements cutting edge dissemination processes to maximize SONNET’s impact by engaging a variety of key stakeholders at local, regional, national and European levels, drawing on insights derived from the different workpackages. SONNET utilizes multiple channels and formats (incl. social media, regional workshops, briefs for practitioners,
infographics, videos) to disseminate its findings to all relevant stakeholders.
Specific objectives of ICLEI Europe are:
– Coordination of the co-creation and dissemination process
– Translating SONNET’s results into actionable recommendations for policy makers
– Development and dissemination of novel and cutting-edge scientific knowledge

ICLEI's roll is to review the 25 city GHG inventories for completeness and to provide support, in some cases actually completing the inventory as needed.

Establishing transdisciplinary foundations
– Facilitate, organize and conduct Urban-Regional Innovation Partnerships (URIPs) dialogues
Developing a novel nature based solutions assessment framework
– Engage stakeholders in Utrecht and Malmö in a multi-criteria method to determine stakeholder values.
– Extend the learning process to the other URIPs in a two-day workshop.
– Identify how current insights and existing methods and models can be combined, improved and further developed.
Enabling conditions for systemic integration
– Participate in the methodological workshop and co-design of the research protocol.
– Undertake the work on systemic integration at the EU level.
Realising the potential of NBS
– Launch the Nature4Cities platform
– Disseminate Nature4Cities through ICLEI member cities
– Support community events
– Draw on contacts with municipal government
– Undertake a scenario back-casting exercise with the URIPs and 15 ICLEI member cities
– Hold a 1.5 day workshop with the URIP members and participants at the ICLEI Resilient Cities congress
Creating trandisciplinary capcity & delivering NATURVATION
– Generate conference/journal papers

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.

Within this project ICLEI Europe is responsible for the exploitation & dissemination.
This includes:
to develop and curate the SMARTEES multimedia presence throughout the project and after the project,
to develop a dissemination and exploitation strategy for the SMARTEES results to all relevant stakeholder groups,
to monitor the implementation of the dissemination and exploitation activities and document the impact,
to develop and program the policy sandbox IT tool in a light and pro version, including developing and implementing the workshop concept.

ICLEI Europe is lead of the project and thus coordinates it. ICLEI Europe is also responsible for the distilling solutions. This includes following aspects:
To distill a final palette of innovative specific recommendations for sustainable and inclusive urban areas from the outputs of WPs 3-5, including policy decisions, urban planning tools, financing mechanisms, and procedural practices with a variety of city-makers, including historically marginalized groups and stakeholders in the city.
To distill policy- and practice-relevant recommendations for target audiences at multiple governance levels and targeting specific policy frameworks (e.g. EU Urban Agenda, SDGs, etc.)
To disseminate innovative solutions and recommendations in multiple formats to UrbanA’s target audiences and beyond using strategic partners’ communication channels