Welcome to the latest edition of ICLEI Links, our roundup of sustainability-related news and commentary from around the web! City Stories Can ‘smart’ birdhouses help improve air quality in Amsterdam? Planning After Big Data and the Internet of Things Urgent action needed to stop terrifying rise in air pollution, warns OECD Climate Change Stories
How can cities use ‘smart’ projects and frameworks to achieve a net positive gain in their resource? Today, as part of the Smart CITIES 2.0 conference at Metropolitan Solutions in Berlin, city representatives, technical experts and business actors gathered in a session on ‘Smart Productive Cities’ to discuss this question. As definitions of the term
Over the next fifteen years, the global urban population is going to increase significantly, and the built environment required to accommodate this growth will expand in turn. In order to ensure that this expansion is carried out in a way which avoids lock-in effects – that would be disastrous to the targets established in the
Under the umbrella of the Sino-German Urbanization Partnership, German and Chinese high-level representatives from the Ministries of Environment and local authorities gathered in Berlin on 31 May for the second edition of the Sustainable Urban China conference at Metropolitan Solutions 2016. Committed to learning from each other, participants to the conference presented local examples and discussed
Air quality is a major issue in most large cities worldwide, but it also impacts on the surrounding rural and peri-urban areas. Rapid industrialization, private transport and residential heating are the main culprits behind the decrease in air quality recently registered by the World Health Organization (WHO). Over 80% of people living in urban areas that
Open data has become an important concept in the Smart Cities debate. By opening up vaults of municipally-generated information, local governments seek to benefit from the power of open data. Smart Cities’ quest for open data while ensuring that it is used and managed appropriately lies at the heart of our third “Paradoxes of a
Who should engage in raising ambition and accelerating climate action? Over the last two weeks, national and local representatives gathered in Bonn for the Bonn Climate Change Conference organized by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to discuss this point. Celebrating the important achievements of COP 21, governments and other key actors
By Omar Siddique, Senior Urban Specialist, Cities Alliance Chapter 7 on ‘human settlements’, which emerged from the first Rio Conference in 1992, received huge political push back from developing countries and environmentalists at the time of the negotiations over the text. Issues regarding cities and settlements were seen as part of the polluting, unsustainable “brown
CONFERENCE LINKS Conference website – http://unfccc.int/meetings/bonn_may_2016/meeting/9413.php IISD Earth Negotiations Coverage is available at http://www.iisd.ca/climate/sb44/ ICLEI DOCUMENTS LGMA Intervention at the Conference Opening and SBI44 Opening Remarks of Ashok Sridharan, Mayor of Bonn and Member of ICLEI Global Executive Committee, at the Reception on 17 May 2016 Transformative Actions Programme May 2016 Update presented at Follow-up
ICLEI is celebrating 20 years of work on sustainable procurement. Sustainable procurement brings environmental, societal and economic benefits at the local level, and can help drive the market towards sustainability. Over the last 20 years, through its activities on sustainable and innovation procurement, ICLEI has been involved in 150 projects; organised 100 conferences, seminars and workshops; trained