The Adaptation Changemakers Project is training and building agents of change for climate adaptation in communicates across Canada. The Changemakers Project is harnessing many stakeholders and decision-makers (municipal, provincial, and federal governments, private sector specialists, industry associations, planners, health professionals) to identify local climate impacts and the actions that each can take to reduce vulnerability to climate change impacts locally. Centered around building capacity to engage stakeholders, assess vulnerability and risk, and develop an implementation-ready local adaptation plan, the project will result in adaptation being integrated across both the municipality and wider community. With technical guidance from ICLEI and regional experts, participants are initiating their adaptation effort with local stakeholders, assessing their risks, and developing a local action plan.

Through the Together for Climate project, municipalities are helping to lead a collaborative co-developed planning exercise with key local groups including regional governments, First Nations, chambers of commerce, land developers, academics, and health professionals. ICLEI is building capacity on climate action by convening eight municipalities in a collaborative adaptation planning process. The process identifies, assesses, and plans for local impacts – with a focus on long-term implementation.

American Geophysical Union’s Thriving Earth Exchange (TEX) program matches communities with earth and space scientists to lay strong, scientifically based foundations for climate action and adaptation planning. ICLEI partnered with TEX for a facilitated workshop with scientists and 12 communities, including ICLEI members Reno and Missoula. In 2017, ICLEI worked with members Antioch, East Lansing, and Savannah as part of the Resilience Dialogues, a public-private collaboration to connect communities with the most appropriate resources. ICLEI acted as a community network lead to help scientists, experts and city staff deliver a set of resiliency questions and connect threats to resource.

ICLEI supports Fiji cities by providing streamlined processes for assessing their risks and challenges and developing achievable action plans. It works side-by-side with the cities and assists them to find partners for action. ICLEI has recently assisted 7 city and town councils to undertake disaster risk self assessment and action planning, using the Sendai Framework and scorecards, and built capacity for disaster risk reduction at 2-day workshops with these cities. City staff and elected councilors now hav an understanding of how disasters and climate change impact all the city development challenges. The outcomes of the DRR workshops have been collated into a “Generic Fiji Local Government DRR Action Plan” and provided to the Ministry Local Government and the National Disaster Management Office as input for their current reviews of the Local Government Act and National Disaster Management Plan.

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.

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.

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.

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.