Balancing beams: Shaping a fair and sustainable future for construction workers, housing, and the climate

Over the past year, IHRB, ICLEI, and BWI researched the social impact of decarbonization in 8 global cities, focusing on housing and worker rights, participation, and spatial equity. This event shares successes and failures, illustrating how these insights drive global just transition initiatives, ensuring inclusivity and hastening climate action. Additionally, young artists’ creations will be showcased, offering inspiring visions for a just transition in each city.

Local Climate Action Summit

The COP28 Local Climate Action Summit is a first-of-its-kind Summit hosted by a COP Presidency in recognition of the critical role local leaders play in reducing emissions, addressing climate risk, and supercharging national efforts to move further and faster on climate progress.

Hosted by the COP28 Presidency and Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Summit aims to bring together hundreds of national and subnational climate leaders to transform climate finance, enhance global action, fast-track the energy transition, and strengthen resilience and adaptation at the local level.

This Summit is backed by the world-leading networks of local leaders as well as subnational partner organizations including America Is All In, C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, Climate Mayors, the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy, ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, United Cities and Local Governments, US Conference of Mayors, the Under2 Coalition, University of Maryland Center for Global Sustainability, UN-Habitat, World Resources Institute, and others.

1 December 2023

16:15 – 17:15: Local Climate Action Summit

2 December 2023

8:30 – 11:00: Mayors Innovation Studio (Invite Only)

9:30 – 11:00: States and Regions: Driving Local Climate Action

11:30 – 12:15: PART I: Critical Impact of Mayors & Governors

13:30 – 15:15: PART II: New Solutions & Finance for Local Action

15:45 – 17:00: PART III: Coalitions of High Ambitions Actors

More information and watch the live stream here.

Circularity as a game changer for climate action: Upscaling applied research and economic solutions

More information coming soon.

Enabling circularity in the built environment

The built environment is responsible for half of global resource use, construction demolition waste accounts for nearly 40% of total solid waste and around 45% of GHG emissions come from the production and consumption of resources and materials.

Circular economy enables decarbonization and reduces the use of natural resources. Hence, there is a need to accelerate the shift from a linear “take-make-waste” economy to a circular “reduce-reuse-recycle” in the built environment.

This discussion will focus on how to accelerate the shift towards circular buildings and the role of innovative building solutions (including design, materials, waste management, etc.), to achieve this shift.

The session also aims at discussing the collaboration levers between partners to create an enabling environment to successfully scale the transition to a circular built environment globally and the various obstacles that are yet to be overcome to achieve this scale up.

Watch live here

The role of transport, buildings and waste in delivering low-carbon and resilient urbanization

The GCA Action Agenda plenary will showcase progress in decarbonising human settlements and transport. It will platform the Buildings Breakthrough, the plastics treaty, transport as a demand sector for clean energy and the nexus between transport, cities and energy. Building on the challenges and solutions identified in the Global Stocktake (GST), it will facilitate the delivery of GST outcomes by strengthening collaboration and integrating action across sectoral stakeholders, policy makers and subject matter experts.

Accelerating the financing of the circular economy in climate and biodiversity strategies

Investments in climate strategies have mainly focused on low-carbon technologies, deforestation and renewable energy, neglecting the circular economy’s potential in the race to meet resource efficiency and energy demand reduction targets.

However, in recent years the circular economy has emerged as a potential solution for halting climate change and biodiversity loss by addressing problems at source. It’s therefore high time that the financial sector pick up the pace of investing in the circular transition.

Although a growing number of sustainable finance instruments can be used to support circularity (such as green bonds, transition bonds, sustainability-linked loans, impact investing and blended finance), mobilising financing for the circular economy is no easy task.

According to UNECE, one of the challenges of scaling up circular economy business models is that they are still perceived as financially and technically risky, particularly when it comes to investments in middle- and low-income countries. Increased cooperation and dialogue between the circular community and financial institutions, as well as the development of international consensus-based standards are fundamental to making meaningful progress in circular financing.

Moderated by: Peter Schmidt, NAT President, EESC

Speakers:

• Oliver Röpke, EESC President
• Florika Fink-Hooijer, Director-General, DG ENV, European Commission
• Juergen Voegele, Vice-President for Sustainable Development, World Bank (tbc)
• Ambroise Fayolle, Vice-President, EIB
• Christoph Winterhalter, Vice-President for Policy & Strategy at ISO and Chair of the Board at DIN, German Institute for Standardisation
• Emmanuel Katrakis, EuRIC
• Holger Robrecht, ICLEI (tbc)

More information here.