Ahead of HABITAT III Thematic Meeting on financing urban development, ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability calls for innovation and scaling-up of public and private finance mechanisms at all levels in order to accelerate the transformation towards sustainability.
On 9-11 March 2016, Mexico City is hosting a global, multi-stakeholder dialogue on financing urban development.The meeting is meant to provide input to the consultations on the New Urban Agenda concept, to be adopted at the 3rd UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development – HABITAT III in Quito, later this year. The hosting of a global event by local governments as an input to intergovernmental processes is one of the many innovations introduced in the HABITAT III Process.
The meeting is hosted by the Government of Mexico City, where Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera is also acting as the Vice President of ICLEI Global Executive Committee. ICLEI’s Head of Global Policy and Advocacy, Yunus Arikan, will be a panelist at the sub-plenary session on climate finance. He will also be on the Advisory Board of the Mexico City meeting, in his capacity as Co-Chair of the General Assembly of Partners representing the Local and Subnational Authorities Partner Constituency within the scope of the Global Task Force of Local and Regional Governments in the Post2015 Development Agenda and Towards HABITATIII.
“Local governments have an enormous potential for global transformation towards sustainability. The vision, experience, technologies and commitments are all there. The still missing pieces are effective governance and financing models. This is why the Mexico City meeting is extremely important and timely.” said Yunus Arikan.
Other ICLEI Members who have been invited as speakers include: Parks Tau, Mayor of Johannesburg and member of ICLEI Regional Executive Committee for Africa; Tanya Müller, Environment Secretary of Mexico City. Officials of the national Finance and Urban Development departments, as well as representatives from Montevideo, Sao Paulo, Paris, Basque Government, Nantes, Belo Horizonte, Brussels, Dakar, Barcelona will also be joining.
ICLEI Mexico and Caribbean Secretariat and ICLEI World Secretariat will also support the side events of our partners WWF Mexico and Cities Climate Finance Leadership Alliance, respectively.
Cities and climate finance. Key facts and figures
- The New Climate Economy report released in September 2015 identified $17bn worth of potential savings by 2050 through investments in public and low emission transport, building efficiency and waste management in cities.
- The State of Cities Climate Finance Report presented by Cities and Climate Finance Leadership Alliance (CCFLA) at COP21 showed that only 26% of total funding by 8 leading financial institutions goes to climate finance, out of which only 30% goes to urban climate finance.
- The Transformative Actions Program (TAP) launched at Cities and Regions Pavilion at COP21 as a global and ambitious collaboration of 29 organizations compiled 120 climate actions by 87 cities and regions from 42 countries. At least $9bn worth of investments will be needed to see these action implemented. Around 42% of these resources would be invested cities and regions in developing countries (almost $3.8bn), which triples the total financing secured by the Green Climate Fund as of end of 2015. According to the recently released Gap analysis report , ICLEI identifies several barriers for local and subnational governments to effectively implement sustainable transformative projects: namely, the decentralized information about finance resources; the complexity of project selection criteria; and the lack of specialized staff in local governments to prepare project finance profiles.
Source: ICLEI
