Category: Cities and climate change

Niteroi Resilience Plan

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Niteroi is a Brazilian coastal city surrounded by hills just outside Rio de Janeiro. With its approximately 500,000 inhabitants, Niteroi’s economy focuses mainly on commerce and services. In 2010, the city had the highest Human Development Index in the state of Rio de Janeiro and the seventh largest among Brazilian municipalities. Also, it is the first of the state concerning sanitation performance.

As a coastal city, Niteroi has at the same time, many tourism possibilities with extraordinary beaches, but also, problems related to sea level rising and eventual rough seas. Climate change has also contributed to an increase in droughts and wildfires.

The city is located between the sea and the hills and in the past decades, with the increasing of the city combined with a non-structured urbanistic plan, most of the hillsides were irregularly occupied by low-income families in a massive way. As the result of this situation, Niteroi has areas occupied by vulnerable people where there are significant risks of land sliding.

In April 2010, more than 240 people died in landslides, most of which occurred on the hills surrounding the city. After that, many preventive actions were made, aiming to reduce the number of accidents and deaths, what generated excellent results.

Finally, the municipal government has developed a Resilience Plan aiming to strengthen the direct and indirect actions of the Niteroi Civil Defense. It has had a great importance and a strong impact in the city. The plan was finalized and launched in December 2019 and its implementation has already started.

Series of virtual events on local climate leadership in times of COVID-19

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The GIZ project “Climate Policy Meets Urban Development” is organizing a series of three online-seminars on local climate action in times of #COVID19. The series will kick off with its first online-seminar on 7 July 2020, 3-4 pm (CEST/UTC+2). The session will introduce Germany’s multi-level governance framework with a focus on the German National Climate Initiative (NCI) and its mechanisms to foster local climate projects.

Session 2 on maintstreaming climate projects into city governance frameworks and session 3 on steering local climate leadership trough collaborative action will take place on 1 September and 5 October. 

More Info

Climate Resilient Urban Development in Southeast Europe

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The virtual event was the first component of the learning process conducted by Connective Cities in Southeast Europe. The aim of the virtual event was to support knowledge exchange and networking by increasing the visibility of good practices from municipalities in SEE region on one hand, and on the other hand by facilitating the needed virtual space and tools to create innovative solutions for local challenges through knowledge exchange and peer-to-peer consultations.

The virtual event, thus, supported transforming dialogue and exchange possibilities into a digital and remote format especially during and in the aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak affecting heavily the lifestyle of urban dwellers and planers. As this will include effects on sustainable urban development, municipal urban practitioners need to develop more innovative and agile processes to improve future crises responses. Here, the interest was mainly in pragmatic solutions and approaches that can be applied or adapted to the different regional/local contexts. Furthermore, the event offered a virtual platform to discuss the challenges around the theme of climate resilient urban development and supported municipalities in developing new project ideas among peers that can be further implemented in the respective home communities or in the framework of existing or new thematic municipal partnerships.

Call for participants: Climate Resilient Urban Development in South East Europe and the Caucasus region

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Responding to climate change plays a crucial role today in sustainable urban development policies worldwide. The Southeast European region is no way exception being heavily impacted by growing trend of urbanisation. This is now coupled with the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 affecting the lifestyles of cities and municipalities, which need to adapt to more innovative and agile ways of working for future crises responses. Against this background, the international cities platform – Connective Cities cordially invites municipalities & urban practitioners to take part in the unprecedented and unique experience: Connective Cities Virtual Event: “Climate Resilient Urban Development” on 8-19 June 2020.

Bring your initial urban project idea and we will incubate it within 2 weeks of digital experience where you can expect to listen to inspiring keynote presentations from leading European scientists and share insights with your peers in carefully curated Peer2Peer collaboration and exchange formats. During asynchronous and synchronous workshops, you will learn how to collaborate digitally and get acquainted with tools, methods and the overall mindset Design Thinking that helps you to be more innovative and successful.

Check out our Call for Participants for more details and apply by 17 May 2020. The invite is predominantly open for the countries fitting under the EU’s reginal dimension of Eastern Partnership and Western Balkans

More information in the Call for Participants [pdf, 1,89mb].

Concerning the questions from international applicants on the event and the participation process, please contact: Mr. Irakli Samkharadze, GIZ Regional Network Coordinator Connective Cities – Southeast Europe. Tbilisi, Georgia (irakli.samkharadze@giz.de)

Interested German experts should contact Ms. Alice Balbo, Connective Cities Project Manager at the German Association of Cities (Alice.Balbo@staedtetag.de)

Climate Proofing Urban Development

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The impacts of climate change include extreme weather events such as heavy rainfalls, severe thunderstorms, prolonged droughts and heat waves. These impacts pose major challenges for cities around the world. Although climate change is a global challenge, adapting to its impacts is largely a local process.

Almost 30 local practitioners from 12 cities, 10 countries and four continents accepted the invitation of Connective Cities and the City of Dortmund to a dialogue event on the topic of ‘Climate proofing urban development’, which took place from 3 to 5 September 2019 in Dortmund, Germany. This report documents the discussed good practices, solution approaches and developed project ideas.

Climate Resilience and Urban Development

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Many cities in the Latin American region have been pioneers in the implementation of environmental measures and policies, as well as in resilience building and adaptation of their territories to the incre- asing effects of climate change. Planning for the future is key for the well-being of our communities, and we need to continue working with and for them in order to mitigate and adapt to the impact that climate change will continue to have on our territories in the coming decades.

This peer-learning note summarizes good practices of Latin American cities with a focus on four different thematic areas: risk assessment, comprehensive planning, finance, and citizen engagement. The practices were discussed during our ConnectiveCities peer-learning event hosted by the city of Niteroi, Brazil between November 26-28, 2019.

More information: 

• Read the Peer Learning Note 26 about Climate Resilience and Urban Development in English, Spanish, or Portuguese.
• Short documentation with all presentations and pictures of the events

Climate just and climate proof urban development

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As a prelude to the new learning process of Connective Cities in Latin America, the dialogue event “Climate just and climate proof urban development” took place in Niterói, Brazil, from 26-28 November 2019. Cooperation partners of the event were the city of Niterói and UCLG Learning.

The 32 participants in the event, mainly local practitioners, came from 17 cities in six countries: Brazil, Germany, Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina and Mexico. All participants work in their cities or projects on the topic of climate resilience/climate adaptation in the context of sustainable urban development. The aim of the event was to exchange experience and knowledge among local practitioners on the subject, to get to know good practices and to give mutual advice to colleagues, as well as to develop project ideas for further processing in subsequent events.

During an excursion, the group first got to know some of the current and completed projects of the Niterói Municipality in situ, and then gained further insights during a meeting with the Mayor Rodrigo Neves.

15 Pathways to localise the Sustainable Development Goals

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This publication illustrates how the 15 pathways of the Basque Declaration can be used by towns and cities to localise the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

In this publication, the 15 pathways of the Basque Declaration are illustrated with stories taken from the Transformative Action database of the Sustainable Cities Platform. Each of these stories are former applications to the Transformative Action Award 2017-2019 and have been reviewed by a jury of experts, which includes representatives from the European Committee of the Regions, the European Investment Bank, UNESCO Etxea, the City of Aalborg (Denmark) and ICLEI Europe.

The purpose of these stories is to provide local governments and other local stakeholders with inspiration for action, rather than the formulation of yet another action plan. The examples also give insight into how to implement the goals using an integrated approach across sectors and departments. For each story, the most relevant pathway and SDGs are indicated, based on an independent assessment by ICLEI Europe. They show the diversity of approaches across topics, geographical locations and local cultures.

The Power of Cities

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“The World Health Organization (WHO) has identified urbanization as one of the key challenges for public health in the 21st century. It is typically discussed in negative terms, including infectious outbreaks, unhealthy lifestyles and environmental threats. Yet cities offer significant opportunities to improve public health through health-enhancing policies and actions. […] City leaders are key allies in delivering national public health objectives among large parts of the population. City leaders have the means, opportunity and obligation to protect the health and well-being of their people by defining priorities, uniting stakeholders around common goals, and ensuring accountability for outcomes. City leaders’ commitment is important not just for the health of cities, but for global health as a whole. […] Cities are the main implementation sites for national health policies and programmes – without their support, global targets are unlikely to be achieved. This report is a call for city leaders to rise to the challenge and show the world how local action can help solve global health problems.”

Resilient cities, thriving cities: The evolution of urban resilience

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“This report uses the decade-long experience of the Resilient Cities Congress series as a proxy to track the evolution of the global resilience debate over the last ten years, creating a solid base to build the next decade of bold action.
It explores a variety of resilience approaches; for example, how multi-stakeholder planning has contributed to finance and boosted local resilience, or how leveraging nature-based solutions has enabled cities’ adaptation to climate change and improved people’s quality of life. The report also provides successful examples of social cohesion benefitting physical resilience, especially in informal settlements.”