In nearly three decades of work, ICLEI has developed, tested and scaled up methodologies to guide the way towards sustainable urban development at the local level. This rich experience accumulated allows us to apply a common framework for our global projects and initiatives, which currently follows the stages: analysis, action and acceleration, and in each one follows a step-by-step guideline. This track can be applied to a variety of themes – from low emission to nature-based development – and promotes a cyclical path that allows the continuous improvement of the governments in our Network. This year’s “Cities + Sustainable – ICLEI South America Solutions Portfolio” highlights the following opportunities and initiatives ICLEI provides cities and regions in South America.

ICLEI is working with Google in order to solicit nonprofit project proposals – exact allocation of funds provided by Google.org would likely range from $100K to $500K per organization; evaluate and select projects to fund with Google input and potential input from local governments; work with the EIE team understand the potential use cases for the data; potentially play a role in monitoring outcomes, capturing insights, and surfacing those insights and examples to other cities; potentially provide capacity building support to selected nonprofits to help them effectively implement their projects. The selected organizations will use EIE to inform and action plan – This could mean more data-driven / tech organizations can help a city integrate new data sources into planning, develop analyses or projections, or model out effects of various actions; and implement actions that help them achieve a goal set using EIE – This may include
awareness building (i.e. getting a specific community out of cars and onto bicycles), volunteering to install solar panels.

ICLEI Innovation will select teams, startups, products, services and innovative processes in the segment of afforestation or urban green areas, which strengthen the management and sustainability of cities, promote green spaces, adopt solutions based on nature and generate measurable management results municipal public health. Through a public announcement inviting organizations for proposal submissiton, ICLEI will select 10 best proposals and start a mentoring process with the selected ones through the online traction e-learning platform and the growth path methodology. This project is expected to collect innovative and sustainable solutions to the challenges brought by local and regional governments.

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.

The Covenant of Mayors in Sub-Saharan Africa supports Sub-Saharan African cities to tackle the interconnected challenges of climate change and access to sustainable energy. Started in 2015, CoM SSA is the African regional chapter of the Global Covenant of Mayors (GCoM), the largest network of cities driving urban climate action.
CoM SSA provides broad-scale technical support to signatory cities through a Technical Helpdesk housed at ICLEI Africa, in Cape Town. At least 25 of these cities are provided with tailored technical support to develop and implement Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plans (SEACAPs).
As the initiative matures, the focus moves from planning to implementation and more specifically on unlocking climate finance at the local level. Implementing partners facilitate dialogue with private sector and finance institutions, link signatory cities with relevant initiatives for funding, facilitate inter-government dialogue on climate finance and co-ordinate action between international commitments, Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

ICLEI is conducting research to help identify drivers and challenges for cities to participate at market mechanisms in the international realm, and more specifically with the cooperative approaches being negotiated at COP 24 & 25. ICLEI together with Perspectives, a German consultancy, is therefore analyzing different CDM, TAP and NAMA projects as well as proposing different approaches for cities to participate with future mechanisms running under Article 6.2 and 6.4 of the PA.

As the frequency and intensity of climate change related disasters increase, local communities are severely impacted. In response to recent climate related disasters on the continent, ICLEI Africa is stepping up to support cities in reducing their disaster risk. We draw on two decades of on-the-ground work in Africa, building and strengthening resilience through proactive planning.

The objective of the project is to analyze the development of urban biodiversity and ecosystem services concepts and practices in urban areas and better integrate them into the science and policy discussions that are taking place in the context of the preparation of CoP15. ICLEI´s focus on key Chinese actors since China is the host country of the CBD CoP 15, as well as on German, European, and other international actors who play a major role in the implementation of measures that promote urban biodiversity and ecosystem services at the local and sub-national level. The specific goal of the project is to provide an overview of the current scientific discourse and environmental policy processes and to raise awareness of the identified key actors through a series of consultation workshops taking place in Europe and in China.

The objective of the IUC programme is to contribute to improve international urban policy diplomacy and increase decentralized cooperation on sustainable urban development and climate change through a focus on sustainable energy. In North America the focus of the project is 1) on peering North American cities with European one so that they can learn from each other on how to tackle their GHG emissions and 2) on providing technical support to GCOM members.

ICLEI provides the capacity of the second key expert and two non-key experts who conduct the following activities:
1) Provide latest information, methodologies, tools, knowledge and skills that support local governments’ projects and policies at all stages of planning and implementation.
2) Support knowledge sharing and exchange of best practices between the Korean and EU cities.
3) Support policy dialogue events and meetings specifically in relation to topics related to sustainable urban development
4) Compile case studies and related stakeholder profiles
The project activity includes establishment of a digital platform, in which EU and Korean nonstate actors can join, share and accelerate climate action. It is expected that exchanging best practices and matching needs through the joint platform will increase the replication of successes, avoid repetition of failures, and generally lead to more ambitious and impactful climate actions.