It was such a pleasure and honour to be back for The Klosters Forum 2024, particularly to gather around such a critical theme - how cities can rise to ecological challenges while advancing equity and justice.
While Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance member cities are at the vanguard of the climate mitigation race, that means they’re also very much working on adaptation as well. Over the past 15 years the adaptation front has been more closely associated with building resiliency. But as both strategies have become more and more integrated, there are greater opportunities to advance both mitigation and adaptation to build resilient communities.
CNCA’s approach to supporting climate action places a very strong emphasis on climate justice. In fact all of our work - whether supporting innovation projects, capacity building or policy development - is structured to help cities advance justice and equity by redressing the disproportionate burdens and benefits of the fossil fuel economy.
It’s a systems-change approach that’s based on principles of reparative and restorative justice. It’s place-based because context is important in determining local challenges.
And it’s focused on helping cities shift from more traditional consultative processes to genuine partnership and co-design, particularly with priority communities who often bear the greatest burden of climate impacts. And that means learning how to share power with and build power in communities.
Climate leaders aren’t necessarily trained in community engagement processes, and often they don’t share the lived experience of the most underrepresented communities. So there is work to do here to flip the script so to speak, to change who’s in the policy framing and making role, in order to ensure that climate action is truly building resilience.
This approach allows cities to really think deeply about how to build resilient communities, and build resilience in communities. This is in some ways the essence of climate justice - creating the conditions for communities, and the lived experience of individuals, to be at the center of climate action.
The outcome is that cities are increasing their capacity to create systems change through their approach to climate action, linking mitigation, adaptation and justice ever more intentionally to build resilience. Thinking back to Indy Johar’s initial framing, building power and resilience in communities is key to unleashing a “massive amount of micro actions on an unprecedented scale” to tackle our social and ecological crises.
Check out inspiring examples of city leadership here:
https://lnkd.in/dShXjQPb
Sheela Patel, Jennifer Lenhart, PhD, Michal Mlynár, Kathryn Wright, Mariella Puerto, Sarah Christiansen, Ben Passer, Nick Sifuentes, @Jessica Boehland, Stephen Birtwistle, Nazakat Azimli, Andwele Bryan, Mel Beeston, Leslie Johnston, M.Sc., Eva Moldovanyi, Dr. Banu Pekol, Jacob Heitland, Tracy Morgenstern, Abderrahmane Amajou
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Here's a glimpse into TKF24's last day of thought-provoking sessions:
After a grounding morning meditation session with Susanne von der Becke, PhD, participants could join the following transformative workshops:
a) Bertelsmann Stiftung explored leveraging public and private data for urban resilience (led by Dr. Kirsten Witte, Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook and Martin Hullin)
b) United Nations-Habitat led a session on challenge-driven innovations and the need for cross-sector collaborations (led by Michal Mlynár and Namrata Mehta)
Following a brief break, our spotlight was on building equitable cities amidst ecological challenges with the following panelists:
Sheela Patel, SPARC India
Michal Mlynár, UN-Habitat (United Nations Human Settlements Programme)
Simone Mangili, Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance
Chair: Jennifer Lenhart, PhD, WWF Lead for Cities
In the afternoon Prof. Sir Niall Ferguson, talked about cities in their historic context, followed by the following two workshops:
a) Nature based Solution Institute Workshop led by Cecil Konijnendijk with input from Elise Van Middelem, Jennifer Lenhart, PhD and Robert McDonald, Ph.D.
b) Guided Herb Hike to discover local plant remedies.
Peter Flynn MVO guided us through the TKF24 days.
The day concluded with a closing celebration in the Hotel-Rest. Chesa Grischuna, the legendary institution of Destination Davos Klosters.
For the more insights into the sessions, check out our TKF24 report, which will be released in a few weeks. Videos will be shared on www.theklostersforum.com
Photos by the wonderful @ https://lnkd.in/dmQYWRRq
