Our Activities

ICLEI supports the island cities by providing streamlined processes for assessing their risks and challenges and developing achievable action plans. It works side-by-side with the cities and assists them to find partners for action. ICLEI has been working with Honiara since 2016 to assist the City to undertake a disaster risk self assessment and action, using the Sendai Framework and scorecards, building capacity and supporting city leaders and staff to attend international events for peer-to-peer exchange and learning. There is now a strong understanding of disaster risk reduction among City staff and elected councilors, and an understanding of how disasters and climate change impact all the city development challenges. The ongoing project has led to strong partnerships between ICLEI, UNISDR, UN Habitat and academic professionals and institutions.

ICLEI worked with Toronto Public Health to carry out research on strategies being used in other jurisdictions to manage extreme heat in older apartment buildings that don’t have air conditioning. The research included both a literature review and interviews with cities in North America and Europe. Eight key strategies were identified for managing extreme heat in Toronto apartment buildings, including active cooling, weatherization and insulation, increasing air circulation, reducing solar gain through windows, increasing natural ventilation, cooling/green/reflective external surfaces, minimizing internal heat generation and cooling on-site within the building.

ICLEI facilitated and trained two groups of municipalities and stakeholders: Training-the-Trainers and Collaborative Implementation Groups. The former worked with 18 communities across the Great Lakes watershed to better understand their local climate impacts and risks. The project helped municipalities convene local workshops to learn how to use climate change modelling data and identify local vulnerabilities, assess and prioritize their risks, and begin developing adaptation plans. The latter worked with 12 communities to move from planning to action on local resilience by identifying implementation ready adaptation initiatives, securing funding for the initiatives, documenting key lessons learned via a case-study series, and leveraging future activities to support the actual implementation of local initiatives.

The Adaptation Changemakers Project is training and building agents of change for climate adaptation in communicates across Canada. The Changemakers Project is harnessing many stakeholders and decision-makers (municipal, provincial, and federal governments, private sector specialists, industry associations, planners, health professionals) to identify local climate impacts and the actions that each can take to reduce vulnerability to climate change impacts locally. Centered around building capacity to engage stakeholders, assess vulnerability and risk, and develop an implementation-ready local adaptation plan, the project will result in adaptation being integrated across both the municipality and wider community. With technical guidance from ICLEI and regional experts, participants are initiating their adaptation effort with local stakeholders, assessing their risks, and developing a local action plan.

Through the Together for Climate project, municipalities are helping to lead a collaborative co-developed planning exercise with key local groups including regional governments, First Nations, chambers of commerce, land developers, academics, and health professionals. ICLEI is building capacity on climate action by convening eight municipalities in a collaborative adaptation planning process. The process identifies, assesses, and plans for local impacts – with a focus on long-term implementation.

American Geophysical Union’s Thriving Earth Exchange (TEX) program matches communities with earth and space scientists to lay strong, scientifically based foundations for climate action and adaptation planning. ICLEI partnered with TEX for a facilitated workshop with scientists and 12 communities, including ICLEI members Reno and Missoula. In 2017, ICLEI worked with members Antioch, East Lansing, and Savannah as part of the Resilience Dialogues, a public-private collaboration to connect communities with the most appropriate resources. ICLEI acted as a community network lead to help scientists, experts and city staff deliver a set of resiliency questions and connect threats to resource.

ICLEI supports Fiji cities by providing streamlined processes for assessing their risks and challenges and developing achievable action plans. It works side-by-side with the cities and assists them to find partners for action. ICLEI has recently assisted 7 city and town councils to undertake disaster risk self assessment and action planning, using the Sendai Framework and scorecards, and built capacity for disaster risk reduction at 2-day workshops with these cities. City staff and elected councilors now hav an understanding of how disasters and climate change impact all the city development challenges. The outcomes of the DRR workshops have been collated into a “Generic Fiji Local Government DRR Action Plan” and provided to the Ministry Local Government and the National Disaster Management Office as input for their current reviews of the Local Government Act and National Disaster Management Plan.

Through the Future Resilience for African CiTies And Lands (FRACTAL) project, local governments in sub-Saharan Africa adopt a model of inclusive climate research and action, effectively bridging the divide between science and policy by responding to city identified challenges with the co-development of relevant climate information. The targeted Southern African local governments participate in city consultations – called Learning Labs – to facilitate knowledge sharing and generation, learning, networking and policy advice. The cities are also exposed to training (at political and technical levels), partnership development and co-production of robust and scale relevant climate information. FRACTAL has established new methodologies for improved collaboration and innovative transdisciplinary research by integrating across disciplines, nations, sectors, and between academia and society. This collaboration is rooted in Africa through effective partnerships between individuals and organisations, and between participants in Africa and elsewhere. This new approach to fundamental climate research is strongly framed by the information needs required for context relevant African societal decisions.

Established in 2010, CDKN is a demand-led network that helps developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean to achieve climate compatible development goals. Through this project, CDKN is shifting from knowledge generating and technical assistance to knowledge brokering. It endeavours to get the right information to the right people and create an enabling environment for implementation and scaling climate and development actions in order to drive inclusive, sustainable and climate resilient development, and enhance the quality of life for the poorest and most vulnerable to climate change. ICLEI’s role is to facilitate knowledge brokering through making information and learning on climate compatible development easier to access and use for the Asia region.

Under the Asia Regional Environmental Technology Cooperation project framework of the Foreign Economic Cooperation Office (FECO), Ministry of Ecology and Environment, China, ICLEI supported FECO in conducting one Indian Environmental Industry Research Report, and two Environmental Industry Research Report Solid Waste and Wastewater Management Systems in the Philippines and Indonesia respectively.

CLEI acted as the coordinator of all activities under this service agreement with FECO, and facilitated planning and implementation of the research projects with the engagement of ICLEI South Asia and ICLEI Southeast Asia. Three research reports were prepared as deliverables of the project and submitted to FECO, as guidance documents for Chinese’s environmental enterprises endeavor to engage with the Indian environmental management market, and solid waste and wastewater management in Indonesia and the Philippines. Through this project, ICLEI supported strengthening the cooperation between local governments and the private sector in the region on environmental industry and technology, in exploring possible solutions to the challenges of sustainable development cities are facing.