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On Saturday, April 11, in Seoul, Korea, the GEF CEO Naoko Ishii met with mayors, leaders of local governments, and city-based networks, together with national governments and international organizations at the ICLEI World Congress to discuss issues related to urbanization from an environmental standpoint. ICLEI- or Local Governments for Sustainability, was founded in 1990 as the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives and leads the international focus on sustainable cities.
Financing for cities is critical to the GEF. First, the world is rapidly urbanizing: by 2050, cities will be home to two-thirds of the world's population. Most of this urban migration will take place in developing countries, to cities that are largely unbuilt or unfinished. OECD and IEA estimate that US$50 trillion in investment is required over the next 15 years to deliver basic urban infrastructure and services, such as transport, energy efficient buildings, telecommunications, and water and waste infrastructure. Secondly, as Naoko Ishii said, "cities in many ways hold the key to the future of our globe and humanity. If we can get our cities right, we can also make a major contribution to sustainable development."
Cities occupy 2% of the world's landmass, but are responsible for over two-thirds of global energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. Between now and 2030, 60% of global income growth and half of energy-related greenhouse gas emission growth will come from fewer than 500 cities (New Climate Economy Report, 2014). Making these cities green and resilient, well-managed, and compact has the potential to produce significant economic, social, and environmental benefits at the global level, as well as for the local population. "Financing is needed not only to build massive amounts of new urban infrastructure, but equally important, to build it right", said Ishii.
Cities raise financing from a variety of sources. They include for example re-directing conventional infrastructure financing such as road building to mass transit; use of land value capture; municipal bonds; performance grants; creditworthiness enhancement; and facilitating private sector investments. There is a need for careful planning as the foundation for mobilizing financing. The better planning such as compact and connected cities helps reduce the infrastructure investment requirement by US$ 3 trillion over next 15 years, while long-term sustainability will attract private sector investment.
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The following is part of the keynote address of the GEF CEO to the plenary at the ICLEI conference: "However our experience from around the world shows that there is limited spatial and infrastructure planning at both national and local levels to guide effective and efficient investments. Rapidly urbanizing countries do not always have adequate national plans to manage urbanization. The World Bank estimates only 1 in 5 of the 150 largest cities in the world have the basic analytics needed for low carbon planning. Land use planning at the national and local levels tends not to be coordinated.
The importance of planning only grows stronger when we consider the urgency of integrating global environmental considerations and resilience into city management through planning, design and action. This is a key rationale for the GEF's new sustainable cities flagship program which we will be launching soon. This flagship program aims to help cities and national governments integrate long term sustainability principles within their urban design, planning, and implementation.
This program was born from our conversation with you cities, city-based networks and institutions, like ICLEI, C40, and others. Many of you have already engaged with sustainability activities and employed certain types of planning tools to make the city greener and more resilient. But many of you also told me that you may benefit if you can tap the global knowledge shared among cities on what kind of planning methods and tools are available and useful, and are interested in benchmarking your progress against your peers.
This program is aspiring to respond to those voices of cities and city-based institutions. The program will feature both global and local actions that are interlinked. At the global level, the program will cross fertilize the knowledge and expertise among cities and city-specialized institutions and help cities deepen its ambition towards greener cities, by providing services such as planning support, developing tools and common metrics for monitoring, and capacity building. At the local level, some priority actions from the sustainability plans will be implemented with investments catalyzed from GEF agencies and national/local sources.
We have been fortunate to get a strong interest from many cities and countries. We are working in 23 cities in 11 countries, including Brazil, China, Cote d' Ivoire, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Senegal, South Africa, and Vietnam. I would like to acknowledge that Johannesburg, Dakar and Recife, which announced their intention to participate in the global Compact of Mayors yesterday, are among those. Also, Asuncion and Lima announced their commitment to the Compact of Mayors two weeks ago. The total GEF financing is $142 million and co-financing is estimated at $1.48 billion. We expect in 5 to 10 years, these 23 cities will act as global ambassadors for urban green planning, with tangible benefits at both the local and global levels.
However what is new in this program is to provide global knowledge sharing platform which I hope will be utilized and strengthened by your participation. The program invites city-based institutions to be part of the consultative committee, and seeks inputs from cities for their sustainable planning, tools and common metrics so that we can improve the quality of services this global knowledge platform can offer. My hope is that this Program will help improve urban resource flows and investments for years to come.
The transition to cities is an unavoidable process, so the question is how to make this transition in the most sustainable, green, and resilient way, to meet the needs of the residents as well as minimizing the negative global impacts. I am excited about this new opportunity, and hope to work with many of you here in the future to help catalyze change on the ground. As Mahatma Gandhi said "The future depends on what we do in the present." We need to work together in the present to make a difference for our common future.
Contact
Mr. Christian Hofer
Senior Communications Officer
Phone: +1 202 413 4185
E-mail: chofer@thegef.org