Cities Alliance is pleased to announce a new partnership with the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40) to build climate resilience in cities through evidence-based scenario planning, target setting and climate action planning.
The partnership will be co-implemented by C40, the World Bank and AECOM, a multinational engineering firm based in Los Angeles, under the Cities Alliance Joint Work Programme on Resilient Cities.
The project will build on the ‘Climate action for URBan sustainability’ (CURB) tool, which was developed by AECOM and managed by the World Bank and C40. CURB is an interactive planning tool designed to help cities take action on climate change by mapping out different action plans and evaluating their cost, financial feasibility, and impact.
As part of this initiative, the CURB tool will be enhanced to better integrate informal settlements into the energy transition and climate action planning process. This will involve developing models of informal household energy use, energy cost, income, and energy-related health and social equity impacts as well as community-level infrastructure.
CURB has been selected as an official decision-support tool of the Compact of Mayors, which has recently merged with the new Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, and this project also aims to help cities develop the capacity to meet their commitments under the Compact.
In addition, the project will work to increase skills and knowledge among city officials and other stakeholders. This will result in better approaches to the development of city-level greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories, the process of setting meaningful GHG emissions targets, and development of energy management plans in the context of broader climate change action plans.
The ultimate goal of the collaboration is to build climate resilience by accelerating the transition towards low-carbon urban development in cities. A key area of focus will be on sustainable energy management in the context of informal settlements.
The project will be implemented under the Cities Alliance Joint Work Programme on Resilient Cities, whose objective is to 'strengthen global partnerships and local resilience strategies to facilitate the flow of knowledge and resources to enhance city resilience tools, approaches, and capacity development interventions within long-term urban planning processes that also address informality and the working urban poor’.
The project is the first grant to C40 from Cities Alliance. Work will be undertaken in eight cities across Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean starting in September 2016 and continuing up to 2018.
