CitiesIPCC: Science for Effective City Climate Action and Resilience Building
Resilient Cities 2018 – ICLEI Global
CitiesIPCC: Science for Effective City Climate Action and Resilience Building
CitiesIPCC: Science for Effective City Climate Action and Resilience Building is published as part of the Resilient Cities 2018 – The Global Forum on Urban Resilience series presenting outcomes and discussion from CitiesIPCC on how to design a cooperative science-politics policy making and research agenda for streamlined city climate action adaptation and implementation, with Maryke van Staden (Carbonn Center; Low Carbon Cities, ICLEI World Secretariat), Anthony Socci (US Environmental Protection Agency), David Dodman (International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED)) and Lykke Leonardsen (City of Copenhagen).
Cities IPCC
March 5th to 7th, 2018 Cities IPCC – Cities & Climate Change Science Conference took place in Edmonton, Canada and saw the participation of 700 delegates from 64 countries (49% female, 51% male), 32% coming from the Global South. The conference was divided in four themes:
- Cities & climate change (Imperatives for action)
- Urban emissions, impacts and vulnerabilities (Science and practice of cities)
- Solutions for the transition to low carbon and climate resilient cities (Science and practice for cities)
- Enabling transformative climate action in cities (advancing science and advancing cities)
Conference outcomes and discussion on research and action for cities and climate change focused on five pathways for more resilient cities:
- Mitigation & adaptation
- Disaster risk reduction
- Co-generation of risk information – tapping into local knowledge (about informal mechanisms)
- Disadvantaged populations
- Governance, finance & networks
Advancing Science Means Advancing Cities
Science providing cities with knowledge enables them to fulfill their climate change leadership potential in both mitigation and adaptation. Cities informing science on relevant research topics and providing feedback on implementation adds a local dimension and makes science more practical and applicable. Albeit both communities are dependent on and benefitting from each other, science’s and politics’ work still takes place in silos. Co-designing projects could be a solution.
Reshaping the way science and politics work together requires for both to respect the reality of and account for the incentive structure and quality standards of each other: publishing peer-reviewed papers and happy citizens, respectively.
Pacemaker Human Factor
Improved communication and cooperation between cities and science allows them to tap into local knowledge about informal mechanisms that eventually heavily affect implementation and effectiveness of policy interventions and climate change actions. The human factor of policy implementation, public and citizens as pacemakers of climate change mitigation measure effectiveness, needs to be assessed scientifically and subsequently inform and shape policy design.
Also, South-East Asia’s and Africa’s growth and widely spread and resource efficient application of informal planning and organization for building resilience (f.i. Balinese water temples rice-field irrigation system) bolsters the importance of including local practitioners’ knowledge into scientific research and policy decisions of the urban agenda.
Building New Knowledge Partnerships at Local and Global Scales
Pulling science, policies and practice together to co-create Global Research and Action Agenda, CitiesIPCC sets out to overcome three challenges identified to realize leveraging on pathways for effective city climate action and resilience building:
- Challenge of scale
- Data, modelling and scenarios at the city scale –> Call for science: getting facts and figures, and quantitative and qualitative documents going into open journals
- Importance of systems approach and multiple knowledge systems –> Calling for a multidisciplinary approach, including health, environment, economics etc.,
One organization determined to establish a global research agenda and identify science, urban policy and practice gaps is Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN). Applying an upstream information collection and processing system, (risk) information is co-generated with public involvement, collected at case study docking stations, referred further upstream to regional hubs and finally centrally aggregated. Over 100 case studies already have been conducted and local best/good-practice and examples made available to other regions.
EPIC-N, Educational Partnerships for Innovation in Communities Network, is yet another example of frontline research on how science can contribute to cities and climate change action, with higher education institutions, which are, too, part of the community at first, partnering with politics.
Summary/ Closing Statement
Setting up a cross-disciplinary city-driven research agenda that provides high-quality applicable evidence helps to create well-informed citizens, communities and local practices that, by design, feed back into the scientific knowledge generation process, and on an even broader level, reconcile science, policies and practice.
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.
