The City Climate Planner program ensures urban professionals are equipped to support local climate action planning, including developing greenhouse gas (GHG) emission inventories; climate action planning (low emission development planning); and climate adaptation planning. These efforts are essential building blocks of local planning and policy development efforts of local governments in addressing climate change.

The Urban Greenhouse Gas Inventory Specialist credential is City Climate Planner program’s first professional certification. It focuses on GHG emission inventories, recognized as a key building block in developing quality climate action plans. Over 20 professionals at ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability are accredited to provide the training.

The way the world heats its buildings uses fossil fuel in an unsustainable way. By providing the methods, data, and tools to enable more sophisticated thermal energy system planning rapidly and cheaply, ICLEI accelerates the multi-government and stakeholder dialogues in Europe and beyond on decarbonizing heating and cooling in an integrated energy system.

ICLEI works with four Brazilian cities to develop an action plans to achieve emissions neutrality and climate resilience by 2050. This includes emissions inventories, scenario modeling, vulnerability analysis and adaptation actions, and the implementation of already consolidated tools, such as CIRIS (developed by C40).

ICLEI developed a detailed and agile dissemination, communication and awareness plan at the beginning of the project, being periodically updated and deployed along the project life cycle (e.g. Updates of social media, website, newsletter, and other promotional opportunities, Creation of dissemination materials like leaflets, posters, templates, business cards etc.. The aim of this activity was to reach the widest possible community through various channels and instruments. Besides it helped assure alignment and synergies with other international initiatives related to plastic waste recovery solutions and technologies, and provided training for the professionals and staff working with these solutions and technologies.

ICLEI builds the capacity of local governments to adapt to climate change and increase their resilience through suite of solutions including planning tools, vulnerability and risk assessment resources, stakeholder consultation workshops and peer and partner networking opportunities.

To assist SI-CAT in its efforts, ICLEI is compiling the best practices in urban resilience and adaptation programs/projects taking place outside of Japan. In 2017-18, ICLEI conducted a set of interviews with local governments worldwide, analyzing those practices and submitted reports which will be used to help researchers and local government officials to further develop understanding of urban resilience and thus contributing to the development of adaptation plans at local level. In 2019, ICLEI will research and compile examples of how local governments are utilizing and systematically managing scientific data in its resilience planning and in its adaptation programs/projects.

Through this project, ICLEI as a leading member of the implementing consortium leads the work package set up to help enhance institutional frameworks through political advocacy and networking. ICLEI leads the project’s support to address legal and institutional frameworks and promote multilevel governance in pilot countries to provide an enabling environment for local and national governments to coordinate and streamline their urban planning and relevant priority sector activities. To this end, ICLEI establishes dialogues (including Talanoa dialogues) and explores partnerships and networking opportunities with political leaders at all levels and leveraging on its role as focal point to the Local Governments and Municipal Authorities (LGMA) constituency of the UN Climate Change and the Friends of Cities group.

ICLEI also provides technical expertise to the local governments in the development of their Sustainable Energy Access and Climate Action Plans (SEACAPs); supports the project’s work to enhance local climate finance and supports the project’s communication and awareness raising activities.

The ICLEI team provided examples of how communities similar to Lake Oswego approach climate mitigation – and reviewed existing documents related to the existing CAP and original GHG Inventory.
Findings were summarized in a memo and presented to staff.
ICLEI Evaluated planned vs achieved emissions reductions using The ClearPath planning module and its default reduction measure types. In addition, ICLEI developed highly flexible “user-defined” calculators to represent reduction measures of interest to the City.
To conclude the analysis, ICLEI applied the Temperate software application to provide Lake Oswego with downscaled climate data to indicate the expected local climate change impacts on the community. From here, ICLEI worked with the community to conduct a vulnerability assessment.
Finally, ICLEI developed a set of Implementation Strategies with outputs from ClearPath's forecasting module and the vulnerability assessment.
The intent of the strategies is to convey information about the intent of each action, how to measure progress towards targets, highlight successes and identify implementation barriers that can be addressed through ICLEI membership support.

ICLEI provides technical guidance by participating in GCoM’s technical working groups, which address mitigation and adaptation in specific data-related sub-groups, including Emissions and Targets; Climate Action Planning; Resilience; and Access to Energy. ICLEI also participates in non-data related groups, including Access to Finance; Governance and Regional Coherence; Research; and Communications.

ICLEI has a representative in each group and sub-group, submits written comments and attends calls and in-person meetings. The goal is to unify and centralize how data are reported, using which channels, and how is it communicated to global stakeholders. ICLEI also provides data revision towards GCoM requirements for ICLEI Members and network of cities.

Recognizing that cities play an important role in leading the way to achieve carbon neutrality in the second half of this century, namely the goals of the Paris Agreement, ICLEI supports cities and regions laying out their vision on a sustainable society in 2050. The declaration lays out a vision for cities leading up to 2050 and encourages cities around the world to join Kyoto in cultivating a culture of sustainable cities that is in balance with the local and global environment.

The African Capital Cities Sustainability Forum (ACCSF) draws together mayors and technical officers from the continent’s most prominent cities to provide a guiding light for how African cities must think about the future and lead sustainability efforts. It facilitates the exchange of knowledge and learning and provides a platform for exploring how to develop truly African solutions to African problems. The event marshals the collective power of capital cities to contribute to, and influence, the pan-African and global discourse on sustainability.

ICLEI, as the co-convener of the ACCSF, is responsible for the
content development and program design of the ACCSF. By hosting the annual event, which brings together mayors and city managers of African capital cities, ICLEI facilitates the exchange knowledge and information on potential interventions, opportunities and threats that influence the potential for economic growth, social inclusion and environmental protection.

ICLEI supports the Clean Energy Living Laboratories (CELLs) and the Project Management Office, especially on local government engagement. ICLEI works with demonstration cities to mainstream a local energy plan and assists the CELLs in developing a curriculum for an executive education program targeting policymakers and stakeholders and support advocacy activities.

ICLEI facilitates City-to-City Exchange activities, conducting workshops to capacitate selected demonstration cities, and linking the cities to possible funding sources. The workshops are aimed to help the demonstration cities in actualizing their local energy plans. ASEP-CELLs’ emphasis on advocating, educating and supporting evidence-based policies and programs is expected to improve the learning conditions and experiences among stakeholders and champions.

Within this project ICLEI accelerates knowledge transfer and dialogue and raise awareness of innovative public procurement in the field of Education and Technology Enhanced Learning across Europe. Specifically, ICLEI support by setting up a European follower group of cities/public procurers interested in the LEA project and technologies.

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.

ICLEI East Asia and UNDRR co-hosted two workshops for two Chinese cities – Ningbo and Chengdu – to raise awareness of urban resilience with specific focuses on climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction among local officials.
The workshops were structured in sessions of concept and tools introduction, and presentations of international and domestic cases on resilience and adaptation. Assessments of local resilience were also conducted via group exercises followed by suggestions on improvements.
ICLEI East Asia and UNDRR will continue to work to support 2 more local governments in China in implementing the Sendai Framework and other urban resilience objectives via workshops. It is expected that local disaster risk reduction planning will be better risk-informed when cities are equipped with skills to assess their respective risks, identify gaps, and ultimately lead to projects to address those gaps. A learning publication will be produced as the final output of the series, to share lessons learned on improving urban resilience in the context of global warming with other cities.