Resilient Urban Futures: Where We Are and Where We Need to Go
Resilient Cities 2018 – ICLEI Global
Resilient Urban Futures: Where We Are and Where We Need to Go
Resilient Urban Futures: Where we are and where we need to go is published as part of the Resilient Cities 2018 – The Global Forum on Urban Resilience series and contains a summary with key messages from , Patricia Espinoza (UNFCCC), Ashok Sridharan (City of Bonn), Peter Head (The Ecological Sequestration Trust) and Ina Schieferdecker (Fraunhofer IAIS; WBGU) on the Talanoa Dialgoue and cities and regions taking their place, educational partnerships between universities and politics, citizen-centered cross-sectoral policy-making and the power of big data, digitalization and open public digital infrastructures for cities transformation to a safer, cleaner and more resilient future.
Resilient Cities 2018
Growth of the Resilient Cities conference mirrors the speed, scale and force of the urban surge and its potential to significantly affect the resilience of cities as well as rural areas. Whether urban developments’ growing impact on cities, humanity and the planet will be for good or bad is strongly path dependent. (You may also want to read on here.) The increasing influx of new participants from worldwide different cities and regions to Resilient Cities also underlines the awakened consciousness of cities of their responsibility to engage in the climate change dialogue and implement Agenda 2030. However, we still need more action and we need to duplicate and triplicate across the world since we are still far away from achieving goals of the Paris Agreement.
Cities is where the climate battle will be won or lost. This makes your work at the congress very important.
– Patrizia Espinoza, Executive Secretary, UN Climate Change, Bonn, Germany; Co-Patron of Resilient Cities 2018
Climate change is more than about rising temperatures and sea levels, it’s also about rising rates of poverty, migration and unequal gender presentation. The impacts, ranging from flooding, fire, drought, hunger crisis and marginalization, affect both developed and developing countries, the Global North and the Global South, and it’s not going to get better. It’s posing a challenge to cities’ infrastructure, economy and the people living there.
Talanoa Dialogue
Talanoa Dialogue, building on the Bonn-Fiji Commitment of COP23, the 23rd United Nations Climate Change Conference happening last year in Bonn, provides a platform for climate stakeholders from across sectors to exchange knowledge that helps to build a resilient future by untangling those challenges that are standing in the way of integrated and inclusive actions. In face of the wicked problems that climate change brings about, resilience is about more than protecting financial assets, protecting rivers and cities, it’s about ceasing opportunities to build a better future, built on clean and better, on sustainable solutions, a future where we are better prepared for risk, better prepared to address the many global challenges that are linked to climate change.
Cities and Regions
Emphasizing the importance of SDG 11 as a crosscutting goal, benchmark and indicator for sustainable development, facilitated by ICLEI, cities, regions and their networks are inviting national governments to join the dialogue – the Cities and Regions Talanoa Dialogue – to co-develop together with public and private stakeholders strategies to leverage on cities’ role in climate change and align urban development with sustainable development.
We live in times of change. Not all of this change is welcome. Change can be threatening, but we also live in times of change makers, and cities and regions have proven to be change makers in the best possible way.
– Ashok Sridharan, Lord Mayor of Bonn and First Vice President of ICLEI at Resilient Cities 2018 (Bonn, Germany)
Advancing Science means Advancing Cities
For cities to fulfill their climate change leadership potential in both mitigation and adaptation, they need to be provided with enabling knowledge. However, due to science, politics and practice rather working in their own silos, lots of knowledge remains untapped, or data is not used in an effective or efficient way to inform cities. A dialogue fostering multi-level collaboration among scientists, mayors and politics, such as CitiesIPCC conference, can help guiding science and practice gathering and processing data to produce relevant information for improved political decision-making and effective policy implementation, combining knowledge creation and action taking on the local level.
Power of the Citizens
At the center of resilience building measures and measurements should always remain the most important resource of cities: the people and their socio-economical health and well-being. Local and regional governments opening up the dialogue with citizens about climate change in a way that matters to them, for instance with the help of the Talanoa Dialogue, asking: “for you, is it about waste management, sanitation, food provision, job security, gender equality or clean air and water?”, helps to tap into this crucial resource at the place where people are actually most connected and accessible to their governments – cities.
Cities is where the climate battle will be won or lost. This makes your work at the congress very important.
– Patrizia Espinoza
All together
What’s required to leverage on the capacity of all stakeholders on the ground is cross-sectoral collaboration and mainstreaming climate change and sustainability measures across the board of all current activities and areas, incl. finance, infrastructure, transport, procurement, etc. Looking at wicked problems in the urban context through a combination of different lenses allows for an overall more holistic perspective. Furthermore, extending cooperation vertically with national government and international organizations could make local knowledge about best-/ good practice available globally.
Future Digital
Taking openness as guiding principle, digitalization and big data could be the means to connect, inform and enable actors to be locally more efficient and, on the global scale, have an even greater impact. However, with open data platforms (including open standards, open interfaces, open source and open data) issues around digital resilience, such as security and trustworthiness, arise. Public digital infrastructures could provide the power needed for the global transformation, but also puts urban resilience to test.
Truly resilient cities are those that anticipate challenges of tomorrow.
– Gino Van Begin, Secretary General, ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability
Globally Local Resilience
Connecting global, national and local risks and opportunities across layers – the economic, environmental and social one – by means of big data and scientific evidence, creates a regional applicable collective intelligence that could guide decision-making in all polices with regard to resilience, linking global dimensions and climate change challenges to local contexts. Some of the innovative solutions that emerged thus far out of the sectoral and disciplinary, and regional and national opening process and were discussed during Resilient Cities 2018 in Bonn, Germany, are Nature-based Solutions (NBS), circular economy, resilience bonds and partnerships with Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs).
All images used in this post and all other posts within the Resilient Cities 2018 – The Global Forum on Urban Resilience series are property of ICLEI.
