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By Lucas Dietrichson, Communication Strategist, City of Malmö and Braoin MacLauchlan, Communications Assistant, ICLEI World Secreteriat The sustainable housing development Bo01, part of the European Housing Exposition 2001, celebrates 20 years of a thriving urban community. The project has won several awards and is still attracting people from all over the world who want to 

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The City of Pittsburgh knows that it is critical to approach inclusive procurement with a lens of sustainability in order to create opportunities to realize the 2030 climate action goals. How procurement is managed – what they purchase, where they invest and what kinds of companies they contract with – is interconnected with the city’s 

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a new report, Climate Change 2021: the Physical Science Basis, which brings together the most recent advances in climate science to outline the current state of climate change. The results are grave. The opening line of the report’s Summary for Policymakers reads: “It is unequivocal that human 

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With the increase in commercial interest for climate solutions, more companies are acknowledging a need to invest in the zero-carbon economy and to minimize their environmental impacts. At the same time, local and regional governments are trying to prioritize mitigation and adaption policies in light of the climate crisis’ adverse effects. However, if limiting global warming 

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Cities are at the epicenter of food value chain vulnerabilities  Despite the zero hunger goal set in 2015 in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the number of people affected by hunger globally has been slowly on the rise since 2014. An estimated 2 billion people in the world did not have regular access to 

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By Lucas Dietrichson, Communication Strategist, City of Malmö and Everica Rivera, Communications Officer, ICLEI World Secreteriat The  City of Malmö is one of Sweden’s biggest public purchasers.  Through smart procurement, the city has been able to contribute to sustainable development and support circular thinking. Here are three examples: 1. Raising the bar for sustainable IT 

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The need for ambitious and inclusive climate action is urgent. With the climate crisis accelerating at an unprecedented rate, the question is no longer what needs to be done, but how our actions can be most effective and efficient.  There is no simple solution to the climate emergency. Climate action is an iterative process of 

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Climate commitments don’t simply fall out of the sky – successful climate action requires awareness raising, coalition building and buy-in and commitment from stakeholders at all levels.  That is why the Ambitious City Promises project has focused on bottom-up models of climate action, supporting local governments in Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines to pivot away 

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When the whole world agrees to keep temperature from rising beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius, how, exactly, is one city supposed to act?  This question is at the heart of Ambitious City Promises (ACP), a 4.5 year-long project aiming to actualize the Paris Agreement’s high-level goals for local governments in Southeast Asia. Frameworks to bring global 

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The next decade will decide the future for humanity. Delivering a green and just recovery to the COVID-19 crisis; creating strong, fair economies that serve everyone; and drastically cutting greenhouse gas emissions quickly enough to limit global warming to the 1.5° degrees Celsius target of the Paris Agreement, are all one and the same thing. 

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As cities around the world make commitments to become carbon neutral, African cities have to consider the millions of people that still require basic energy services and find ways to increase access while limiting emissions and resource use. According to 2019 data from IEA, 600 million people in Africa are yet to receive energy access. 

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In Hanoi, a city that is home to 7.7 million inhabitants, 5 million motorcycles flood the streets every single day. This is a staggering number that Hanoi is investing to change. As a rapidly-growing capital and the second most populous city in Vietnam, Hanoi City is taking steps to address unprecedented levels of motorization and 

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Over the past 50 years, biodiversity loss has taken place at an unprecedented scale driven by extraordinary change in land and sea use and the overexploitation of natural resources. In an increasingly urbanized world, natural habitats have been converted to urban areas at an alarming rate. Historically, cities have posed a threat to biodiversity and 

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It is time to turn this opportunity into a new normal in every country towards COP26. ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability USA applauds the Biden administration for announcing the U.S.’ second nationally determined contribution (NDC) submission to the Paris Climate Agreement, which aims at 50 to 52 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels 

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If there was a common storyline at last week’s ICLEI World Congress, it was that local politicians are pushing hard on multiple fronts to enact positive change, often with more aggressive targets than their peers at the national level. Targets however, that require at least some degree of federal funding in order to come to 

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“ICLEI has been tackling climate change for more than 30 years and when we started, it was certainly not a hot topic, but today it is a critical topic and it is literally life-defining for many people,” observed Maryke van Staden at last week’s ICLEI World Congress 2021-22. She went on to note that in 

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At the opening of the ICLEI World Congress 2021 – 2022 Virtual Launch, ICLEI’s newly elected leadership came out in force to show their commitment to nature-based, circular, resilient, low emission and equitable development.  Facing the on-going global pandemic, ICLEI leaders kicked-off the ICLEI World Congress 2021 – 2022 with an all-digital event. Katrin Stjernfeldt 

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“Humanity’s relationship with nature is broken.” That’s the unsettling observation UN Secretary General António Guterres made in a recent speech that Kobie Brand says helps keep things in perspective for her in her capacity as Global Director of the ICLEI Cities Biodiversity Center. “He said that we are in a crisis… and the defining issue 

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We have all heard that when it comes to the climate crisis, cities are both the problem and the solution – and the same is true for the daunting challenge of plastic pollution. Globally, cities are dealing with the impacts of plastic pollution – both to aquatic life and to terrestrial ecosystems – while trying 

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Consumption-based emissions—the so-called indirect emissions associated with food choices, travel habits, supply chains and many more activities that keep cities running but are not directly tied to local production—are proving to be the blind spot of current mitigation efforts. Cities eager to target consumption-based emissions should focus on the transition to sustainable lifestyles at the 

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In Metro Manila year round, the average high temperature never drops below 30°C, and cooling is a significant part of the energy bill for families, businesses and municipal governments across the region. But by setting the thermostat to 25°C, rather than 23°C, an average family can save PHP 1,800 (nearly 40 USD) per year.  That’s 

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Ten years ago, ICLEI launched the first Resilient Cities Congress to respond to a growing and largely unaddressed need of local and regional governments to plan for the uncertain impacts of climate change in an integrated manner. Since then, resilience has gone from a fringe topic to a mainstream climate policy approach at all levels. 

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In the past years, citizen-led activism around the Fridays for Future movement and other climate justice groups have succeeded to make themselves heard, generate political momentum and mainstream climate change awareness across the broader population. Some local governments have answered these calls for action by declaring climate emergency in their cities and towns, often paired 

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