Tag: Import-Documents-10-06-2025 EN

Sustainable Urban Mobility and COVID-19

Posted on by erik

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to fundamental changes in urban mobility worldwide. Some impacts are short-term, especially during lockdowns. Others are long-term changes in the way urban mobility and traffic will operate in the future. Sustainable urban mobility and Covid-19 was the focus of the Connective Cities Virtual Dialogue Event in partnership with United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) and UN-Habitat and hosted by the City of Wiesbaden – Germany that took place on 19, 20 and 22 July 2021. This peer-learning note summarizes good practices of participating cities with a focus on local public transport, bicycle traffic and sustainable urban logistics.

In addition to the English version, there is also a German and Spanish version.

Additional information: a summary of the event including all presentations is available here.

Research of good practices on the subject of health, business, and governance at municipal level during the COVID-19 pandemic

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The report aims to explore municipal initiatives and measures taken to address health, governance, and business sector challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The report is structured as follows:
The first part reviews the methodology of country identification for further investigation of good practices at national and city level.
The second, third, and fourth parts consist of good practices in the areas of health, governance, and business during the COVID-19 pandemic, including data analysis in selected countries and a brief overview of municipal practices in response to COVID-19. Good practices were selected from low and medium income countries from Africa, Asia and Southeast Europe.
In the final section, the cities’ challenges and recommendations for Connective Cities are reviewed and conclusions regarding the research findings are also presented.

Strengthening the local implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through local reviews and monitoring

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Connective Cities organised an international virtual dialogue event aimed to strengthen local implementation of the SDGs through local reviews and monitoring. The event was held in partnership with United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) and PLATFORMA and co-hosted by the City of Bonn, which is a front runner in municipal SDG strategies and reporting and published its first Voluntary Local Review (VLR) in October 2020.
Almost 60 participants from 19 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, North and Latin America were able to experience the benefits of working in a global learning community. Participants came from a broad variety of backgrounds, including municipalities, civil society, local government associations, international city networks, universities and United Nations agencies.
The dialogue event focused on three main thematic issues

  • data availability and data collection systems,
  • data-driven policy development and contribution to different levels of governance, and
  • quality citizen dialogue and stakeholder engagement.

During the sessions, participants had the opportunity to exchange on 15 good practice examples, discuss eight challenges related to the main topic and jointly develop pragmatic solutions for four sample cases: the National Association of Municipalities of Mozambique (ANAMM), Bonn (Germany), Lviv (Ukraine) and Manizales (Colombia). These solutions will be translated into projects and will be further developed in the next few months.

This report summarises the main results of the virtual dialogue event.

More information: documentation: Strengthening the local implementation of SDGs through local reviews and monitoring

Municipal energy efficiency projects in MENA

Posted on by erik

By 2030, the population in the MENA-region is expected to increase to 487 million people, 63 per cent of whom will live in cities and their surroundings. The expected population growth will increase the energy demand thus increasing the risk of future energy constraints.

Within the ambit of the learning process on municipal energy efficiency projects in MENA, the virtual dialogue event was held on the 18 – 20 May 2021. The dialogue event aimed at promoting the exchange of expertise on good practices for planning and implementing energy efficiency projects.

The virtual dialogue event was attended by 23 municipalities joining from Algeria, Germany, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Tunisia and Turkey. Working in groups, participants exchanged ideas, worked in collaboration, and developed project concepts addressing local needs and opportunities for energy efficiency in their cities. Throughout the dialogue event, participants showed high commitment to the program with a level of excitement that was particularly evident on day 3 of the event dedicated for peer advisory on challenges and developing project ideas.

The virtual dialogue event had the following direct outcomes:

  1.  Formation of a regional Community of Practice (CoP) that included 23 different municipalities from five countries in MENA in addition to Germany.
  2. Establishment of institutional relationships among municipalities with shared vision to achieve energy transformation and efficiency.
  3. Enrichment of the capacity of more than 23 municipal representatives in the field of energy efficiency project development and the showcasing of 21 different good practices from MENA, Germany, Southeast Europe, Southampton and South Africa.
  4. Successfully enabling the peer-to-peer advisory among different municipalities during group activities, in the main sessions, and during offline times.
  5. Development of 7 energy efficiency project ideas that are ready to be expanded into fullscale project proposal.

This report documents in detail the dialogue event.

Crisis Management

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Crisis management tools support staff in the public health services to ensure that the authorities are able to continue functioning in biological emergencies. As a rule, normal administrative structures cannot cope with the challenges that arise in a crisis. Information and communications management for example must be adapted if it is to cope with increased demands. If sufficient specialist personnel are not available, competences have to be pooled and provided from a more central point. This textbook is designed to provide employees of public health offices, as well as other public health institutions, with pointers on how to systematically prepare themselves for preventing hazards in case of crisis, and familiarise them with the basics of crisis management. As well as covering specialised aspects, the textbook also provides recommendations in particular on operational planning and working in teams. It is supplemented with checklists designed and established in practise to serve as practical tools.

Local Economic Development (LED) and Job Creation in Middle East and North Africa

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Six municipalities from the MENA region have participated in the Local Projects Workshop, which was a 2-days virtual workshop held on the 19th-20th January 2021. The workshop consisted of a series of virtual discussions among the participating municipal representatives and technical and financial experts. The workshop was followed by two virtual sessions on proposal writing for funding and financing of municipal projects held on the 21st and 25th of January 2021 respectively.

The Local Projects Workshop was designed such that the activities are following a normal growth curve of what has been established during the LED Virtual Dialogue taking place in 2020. The harmony established among participants and the understanding of the rationale of the Connective Cities methodology was expanded on to foster peer-to-peer learning with more attention given this time to individual municipalities needs and visions. The Local Projects Workshop approach leveraged the progress made to date by the 6 participating municipalities while addressing further actions including:

  • The interlinkages between LED projects and other areas like education, health, gender, environment, etc.
  • Adapting the LED projects to national and global objectives and priorities
  • Adapting the LED projects to available resources and existing expertise
  • Establishing Strategic and impactful partnerships for the projects
  • Risk forecasting and mitigation measures planning
  • Best approaches to fund projects with different financing mechanisms and tools.
     

COVID-19 implications in the Mediterranean

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The brief cites regional examples from the South Mediterranean, sub-Saharan Africa and Germany on how governments and municipalities developed data dashboards and platforms and employed them in the pandemic response.

The policy brief concludes with an elaborate discussion on the implications and recommendations on how the current crisis can be turned into an opportunity for regional collaboration and promoting data-driven processes in the recovery from the pandemic.

Recommended policy actions include mapping the population that is in urgent need for vaccination, strengthening public health preparedness through bilateral and multilateral cooperation and creating Communities of Practice that contribute to promoting health equity.

Recommendations to promote data sets and data analytics in municipalities are also proposed, including the suggestion to integrate User-Friendly GIS software that is customized specifically for municipal use and written in the country’s native language, which could allow unlocking the geospatial system’s full potential.

City Practitioners Handbook: Circular Food Systems

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This handbook provides local governments with concrete tools their peers are using to facilitate the transition to circular food systems, from stakeholder engagement to designing effective policies. It draws on experiences from the ICLEI network and its Circular Development pathway, learnings from the ICLEI-RUAF CITYFOOD Network and best practices from the Milan Pact Awards. This publication features experiences from 50 local governments and was designed by ICLEI experts in collaboration with champion cities for the benefit of city practitioners.

Creating sustainable cities through low-carbon freight

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Freight transport demand is expected to triple and its associated emissions to more than double by 2050 compared to the 2015 levels, if left unchecked.To reverse this trend, cities and companies need to turn promises into actions.

The purpose of this report is to review existing urban freight movement characteristics across the nine project cities in Argentina, Colombia and India, provide an account of baseline GHG emissions (2019) from urban freight and identify possible interventions to minimize its negative impacts.  The emissions have been established using the EcoLogistics Self-monitoring Tool.

Drawing on the analysis, policy recommendations and interventions are also presented in this report and will be used as part of the Low Carbon Action Plan for Urban Freight (LCAP-UF) in the cities.

Her City

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There is a lack of knowledge in participatory urban planning and design, particularly in involving vulnerable groups in urban development processes. Research has shown that participatory urban development with girls and young women, local actors, as well as multi-level decision-makers, creates opportunities for more inclusive, equal and sustainable urban development.

Thus, Her City provides an opportunity to build capacity on a larger scale. Her City provides municipal professionals, urban actors and local decision-makers with a solid toolbox for mainstreaming youth, gender and socioeconomic perspectives by strategically involving girls and young women in urban planning and design.

Her City’s ambition is to contribute to a range of the 2030 Agenda Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): SDG3 on health and well-being, SDG5 on gender equality, SDG10 on reducing inequality, SDG11 on sustainable cities and communities, SDG16 on peace, justice and strong institutions and SDG17 on partnerships. However, previous experiences have shown that this approach also contributes to implementing other SDGs on the local level.