Supporting Collaborative Climate Action

Guided by the Paris Agreement the importance of engaging all levels of government in addressing climate change became immanent over the past years. The Summary for Urban Policymakers of the Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C provided further input, on how to work towards an urban paradigm shift. It provides options to take advantage of the opportunities presented by urbanisation as an engine of achieving transformative and sustainable development.

The cluster session will present a wide array of mechanisms and approaches of collaborative action that proved to be effective in enhancing the implementation of policies, strategies, regulations and action plans. Against the backdrop of urbanisation being one of this century’s most transformative trends, the session will reveal valuable insights on how to best address vast sustainability challenges by supporting collaborative action. It will discuss NDC implementation for a pathway towards low emissions climate-resilient development.
Furthermore, it will highlight the value and need for increasing multilevel and multi-stakeholder initiatives to provide additional support to on-going efforts on enabling true transformation towards a climate-friendly development path.

The cluster session, Supporting Collaborative Climate Action , will highlight the value and need for increasing multilevel, multi-stakeholder initiatives in providing additional support to on-going efforts on enabling transformation towards a climate-friendly development path. Concrete examples of success stories will be shared, drawing upon the progress made through scalable projects, as follows.

• V-LED
Vertical Integration and Learning for Low-Emission Development in Africa and Southeast Asia, seeking to harness the subnational potential for low emission development in four countries.

• C-Track50
Mobilises and guides public authorities at a local and regional level, in order to achieve climate resilience and carbon neutrality by 2050.

• Urban-LEDS II
ICLEI and UN-Habitat support integrated climate action in 60+cities and districts, guiding local governments in 8 countries – Brazil, India, Indonesia and South Africa (from Phase I) and Bangladesh, Colombia, Lao PDR and Rwanda – on climate resilient, low emission development, also guiding enhanced multilevel governance.

Together with these specific examples, the session will discuss the hallmarks of collaborative partnerships and how they can improve the mainstreaming of climate actions in government, and speeding up NDC implementation. This discussion would address the role of external support mechanisms, which are already being provided by actors (e.g. ICLEI and the NDC Partnership), in providing useful opportunities for peer learning to develop measurements for success in this area.

This cluster session was conceptualised to feature two 90-minute sessions where the first part provides a “storytelling” session, while the second part dives deep into a “hot seat” panel.